Unusual to share a grave with close relatives in the Middle Ages

 When archaeologists find adults and children buried together in medieval graves, it is often assumed that they were members of the same family. A new study from Stockholm University in Science Advances suggests otherwise.

Researchers at Stockholm University analysed DNA from 142 individuals dating from the late Viking Age and Middle Ages, including more than 60 children and adolescents buried in multiple graves at sites in Sigtuna, close to Stockholm, Västerhus in Jämtland, and Fjälkinge in Skåne.

The results show that close biological relatives were surprisingly rare among people buried in the same grave, even at cemeteries where high levels of kinship could be detected.

”We often assume that adults and children sharing a grave were parents and children or other close family members. In most cases, that was not what we found,” says Maja Krzewińska, Centre for Palaeogenetics, Department of Archaeology and Classical Studies, Stockholm University, lead author of the study.

Instead, the researchers’ findings suggest that factors other than close family ties often influenced who was buried together.

”Archaeologists have debated the relationships between people buried together in this type of grave for a long time. Ancient DNA has finally given us the tool we have been waiting for to test these interpretations directly,” says Anna Kjellström, researcher at the Department of Archaeology and Classical Studies, Stockholm University.

The study also sheds light on the lives of children in early Christian Scandinavia. By using ancient DNA, the researchers could determine the biological sex of children who were too young to be identified osteologically. Boys and girls were often buried according to the same cemetery rules as adults. For example, at Västerhus, where men and women were generally buried on different sides of the churchyard, boys and girls followed the same pattern. This suggests that gender identity was recognised early in life.

”The children were not treated as a separate category. In death, they appear to have been treated according to the same social and religious principles as adult men and women,” says Anders Götherström, Professor of Molecular Archaeology, Centre for Palaeogenetics, Department of Archaeology and Classical Studies, Stockholm University.

The study also identified a remarkable family from the medieval cemetery at Västerhus. One woman, known to researchers as Lady 56, could be linked through DNA to several relatives buried in the churchyard, including her parents, her brother, and two daughters. Yet her story extends far beyond Jämtland.

Buried with her was a scallop shell, a rare object in a medieval Scandinavian grave and a well-known symbol of pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain. The find suggests that she completed one of medieval Europe’s most famous pilgrimages, travelling thousands of kilometres across the continent to the far edge of Christian Europe before returning home. Lady 56 died before the age of 30. Her parents, brother, and daughters were also buried in different part of the same cemetery in Jämtland.

The study demonstrates how archaeogenetics can advance our understanding of medieval society, revealing not only biological relationships but also the social worlds in which people lived, organised their communities, worshipped, and were ultimately laid to rest.

The article “Equal in death: Ancient genomic analysis of children’s early Christian burials” was published in Science Advances, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aeb8588

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Journal

Science Advances

DOI

10.1126/sciadv.aeb8588 

Evolution of the Pictures of Tilling and Weaving, Southern Song Dynasty to the Qing Dynasty

 Gengzhitu 耕織圖 (Pictures of Tilling and Weaving) functions as a cultural artifact representative of agrarian civilization and dynastic governance, fulfilling dual roles as a vessel for agricultural knowledge and a motivational tool for farming practices. 

Over the course of its transmission from the Southern Song Dynasty to the Qing Dynasty, a fascinating relationship emerged between the practical knowledge imparted by the Pictures of Tilling and Weaving and its role as a motivational tool for agricultural practices, creating a dynamic interaction akin to a seesaw effect. The fluctuation between the “form” and the “knowledge” of the Pictures of Tilling and Weaving provides valuable insights into the characteristics of scientific knowledge dissemination in traditional societies. 

This paper investigates the propagation and transformation of the Pictures of Tilling and Weaving, with a particular emphasis on the changes in its acknowledged intellectual merit and political importance throughout various historical epochs. The objective is to deepen comprehension of the interplay between the “form” and the “knowledge” in the conveyance of traditional agronomic knowledge as illustrated by the pictures.

Why the Polynesians suddenly sailed east

 Major drought forced people to migrate across the Pacific beyond Samoa and Tonga and towards the Americas, scientists have discovered.

With the new live action Moana film hitting cinemas on Friday [10 July], a team of geographers and climate scientists from the Universities of Southampton and East Anglia has discovered the true history of the tale.

Moana tells the story of a young Polynesian girl who leaves her threatened home island to sail past its barrier reef to save her island and its people.

The story is built on a period of history called the ‘Long Pause’. Around 3,000 years ago the ancestors of modern Polynesians arrived in Samoa and Tonga, and for 1,700 years they did not sail further east into the Pacific. Then around the years 900-1050 AD, they voyaged east and within 250 years settled the remaining island archipelagos of the South Pacific including Tahiti, Hawai’i and the continental Americas, in what was the greatest seafaring migration in history.

David Sear, Professor of Physical Geography at the University of Southampton and lead author of the study, said: “We have confirmed the theory that the end of the Long Pause coincided with a period of mega drought in the homeland islands of Samoa and Tonga – and also a period of increasing rainfall in the receiving islands. As they headed east, they found wetter islands with nobody on them.

“There was a huge explosion of migration, and within 250 years they had landed and settled every little dot in the South Pacific, from tiny coral atoll islands to larger lands. It was a very rapid process.”

Analysing samples from mud

The research team analysed mud samples from deep beneath swamps and lakes in Samoa, Tonga, French Polynesia and the Cook Islands.

They used ‘biochemical fossils’ produced by freshwater algae and leaves to measure the isotopic ratio of hydrogen to determine historic rainfall levels. This data consistently showed evidence of a severe and prolonged drought just before and during the period of migration.

“Hydrogen in rainwater contains heavier and lighter isotopes, the proportion of which is determined by the amount of precipitation in the tropics– which we were able to analyse in the mud,” explained Dr Mark Peaple, research fellow in paleoclimate at the University of Southampton, who undertook the geochemical analysis. “So analysing the ancient biomarker fossils we can reconstruct rainfall changes from thousands of years.”

When the Long Pause ended, it was the driest period in the last 2,000 years for these islands, so the islands’ populations were forced to move.

Climate modelling

The scientists also used climate modelling to understand the drivers of the dry conditions found in Samoa and Tonga.

Manoj Joshi, Professor of Climate Dynamics at the University of East Anglia, led the climate modelling. He said: “Our research shows that changes in sea surface temperatures across the Pacific Ocean over many decades drove an eastward shift in the vast rain belt that lies over this whole region, causing the dry conditions found in Samoa and Tonga.

“The climate changes we identified would have transformed daily life on these islands. Reduced rainfall would have affected freshwater availability, food production and the resilience of communities, creating powerful incentives for people to seek opportunities elsewhere.”

Dan Skinner, research fellow at the University of East Anglia who undertook climate modelling experiments said: “We now know that the climate – and specifically a period of severe drought for many years, even decades – is a definite factor in forcing this impressive migration.

“These findings illustrate how sensitive human societies can be to long-term changes in climate. Even highly skilled and adaptable communities may be driven to undertake extraordinary journeys when environmental conditions deteriorate over many years.”

Professor Sear added: “Other factors would also have contributed to the tipping point that made the costs of sailing into the eastern Pacific worth risking. There was an increasing population, meaning resources had to stretch further. Also, they had probably developed advanced sailing technology for their voyaging canoes by this point, adapting from U to V-shaped hulls and improving their rigging, which meant they could sail into the wind, which is predominantly east to west across the South Pacific.”  

The research is published in the Journal of Pacific Archaeology.

Instead of only eating maize directly, early farmers were also eating animals that ate maize

 Maize, or corn, is a major dietary staple in Maya communities past and present because of its reliability, potential for surplus and suitability as both food and fodder. It became so important to ancient Mesoamerican communities that it even became central to many of their religious beliefs, and arguably, they built their societies on it; yet maize has a major nutritional limitation. 

Although it is an excellent source of carbohydrates, it is surprisingly low in lysine, an essential amino acid that serves as a crucial building block of protein. Without enough lysine, people cannot build and maintain body tissues like muscles and bones. Previous work suggests that as much as 70% of the protein in ancient Maya diets was ultimately derived from maize. But there is a problem: an adult would have to eat over 13 pounds of dry maize kernels (nearly 40 pounds of fresh maize) every day to get enough lysine, an impossible amount. 

So how, then, did early maize farmers survive and thrive as maize consumption was rapidly increasing? 

This conundrum is why new research by Nadia Neff, a doctoral candidate in archaeology at the University of New Mexico, is groundbreaking. Her paper, titled Nutritional Adaptations to Early Maize Cultivation: Earliest Isotopic Evidence of Maize-Based Animal Provisioning in the Neotropics, has been published in the AAAS Science Advances Journal and shows how ancient farmers used innovative methods to adapt their primary food source to meet their dietary needs. Using cutting-edge amino acid isotope analysis and statistical modeling, Neff and team traced individual amino acids from maize through animals and into ancient human diets spanning more than 5,000 years in Central America. 

The results of their study show that maize-eating animals, such as turkeys, likely acted as biological “protein concentrators.” Because these animals can eat far more food relative to their body size than humans, they can obtain all the lysine they need from maize alone. When people eat those animals, they are essentially accessing concentrated maize-derived lysine converted into high-quality animal protein.

“What we found is that these early communities weren’t simply adopting agriculture for calories,” said Neff. “They were actually actively engineering their food systems to solve different nutritional problems.” 

According to Neff and her faculty adviser, Keith Prufer, their findings suggest that maize cultivation and animal management developed together much earlier than previously recognized. Instead of viewing maize farming and animal management as separate innovations, their study shows that they likely formed complementary parts of a greater adaptive food system as early as 6,100 years ago. 

Her findings are even more interesting because this study was not what she originally set out to find when she first began data collection. She conducted a few analyses examining the carbon stable isotope ratios in the amino acids of bone collagen and was confused by how high the lysine values she measured were, given how little lysine there is in maize. 

“It’s just not possible for people to eat enough maize directly to result in such high carbon stable isotope ratios in their lysine,” she said. Prompting her to look for other potential explanations for the patterns she was seeing. 

By collaborating across multiple disciplines, including archaeology, biochemistry, ecology, nutrition science and observations of modern Maya farming practices, Neff and her team were able to demonstrate that instead of only eating maize directly, early farmers were also eating animals that ate or were fed maize, thereby “concentrating” maize-derived lysine as it moved up the food web, reconciling the stable isotope ratios she had measured, and gaining a deeper understanding of this ancient society.

Neff has been working as a bioarchaeologist on Prufer’s archaeological project, Research into the Origins and Organization of Tropical Societies (ROOTS), traveling each year to rockshelters in southern Belize to conduct excavations. 

Working with local communities and NGOs, they carefully excavate sites dating back 10,000 years, and at UNM’s Human Ecology and Radiocarbon Lab at the Center for Stable Isotopes, Neff performed her analyses to study the isotopic signatures in individual amino acids from human and turkey bone collagen and modern plants. 

“We used amino acid isotope analysis because it gives us a much more detailed picture of human nutritional biology than looking at bone collagen as a whole,” Neff explained. This allowed the team to more closely examine how people in the past grew, prepared and ate food. 

UNM’s Center for Stable Isotopes is one of the few labs in the country capable of performing this type of analysis. 

“Nadia is building on decades of our work on early diets in the American tropics and significantly expanding our understanding of these ancient community practices in the Maya communities,” Prufer, the director of the Human Ecology and Radiocarbon Lab and core faculty at the Center for Stable Isotopes, explained. “Our research even shows that maize was adapted much earlier than previously believed.”

Beyond rewriting the history of ancient Maya diets, Neff’s work shows the power of amino acid isotope analysis to reveal relationships hidden inside ancient food webs. By showing how past societies built nutritionally resilient food systems, her work also offers new perspectives on modern discussions of food security, agricultural sustainability and overall human nutrition.

To learn more about this research, visit the AAAS Science Advances website or email Neff directly at ncneff@unm.edu. 

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Did elephant energetics decide Hannibal’s Alpine crossing route?

 

A new analysis sheds light on the most likely route for the Carthaginian general’s famous crossing of the Alps. The study, led by the University of Oxford and iDiv/Friedrich Schiller University Jena, reveal that the Col de la Traversette would have been the least energy-intensive route. The findings have been published today (July 6, 2026) in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The study provides a novel perspective on one of history’s most famous military journeys: Hannibal’s route across the Alps in 218 BC with an army of 40,00 men, 7,000 horses and 37 war elephants. The researchers applied a bioenergetic approach to evaluate competing theories about Hannibal's crossing by focusing on the energy demands of the journey, particularly for the army’s war elephants.

The findings support the Col de la Traversette as the more likely route, rather than the Col du Clapier, which previously was the leading candidate. Using route modelling and elevation data, the team estimated the energy cost of each possible Alpine crossing. This drew on modelling methods based on contemporary African elephants which estimate the energy costs of movement based on body mass and terrain slope.

The results suggest that the Col de la Traversette would have been the shortest and most energetically efficient route, with a total cost for the whole army of 5.42 TJ (10^12 joules). The route ranked second, at 6.02 TJ, crossed the Alps at the Col de Montgenèvre and reached the Po Valley from Susa. The Col du Clapier route was ranked third at 6.28 TJ, while the route crossing Col du Mont Cenis was the least efficient option at 6.45 TJ.

Compared with the Traversette route, the routes via Col de Montgenèvre, Col du Clapier and Col du Mont Cenis would have required 11%, 16% and 19% more energy for the army as a whole, respectively.

The team’s results also underline the biological challenge of moving the army through the mountains. On the Traversette route, the men would have lost 19% of their body fat reserves during the crossing, potentially explaining their high mortality. Surprisingly, the model suggests that the war elephants would have fared better, only losing 4% of their reserves. Such high energy reserves likely explain why many, if not most, elephants survived the crossing.

The study demonstrates how movement ecology can offer new perspectives on Hannibal's decision-making, and how interdisciplinary research can shed new light on historical events by combining ancient sources with modern analytical methods.

Study co-author Professor Fritz Vollrath (Department of Biology, University of Oxford, and Save the Elephants UK) said: “Applying insights gained from studying the energetics of African elephants in Kenya is bringing a novel dimension to the longstanding debate over Hannibal's Alpine crossing.”

Co-author Dr Emilio Berti (German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) and the Friedrich Schiller University Jena) added: “The question of Hannibal's exact route has been debated for generations. The new analysis does not eliminate all ambiguity, but it does strengthen the case for the Traversette route by demonstrating that it would better accommodate the demands of moving a large army that included elephants through extremely difficult alpine terrain.”

It is still unclear why exactly Hannibal used elephants during the Punic wars. Potentially, he intended them to provide a tactical element of surprise in his first battles against the Romans. Alternatively, he may have hoped they would awe and help recruit the Celts of Northern Italy to his side.

 URL: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2612764123. 

Modern humans and Neanderthals may have shared long-term cultural continuity

Peer-Reviewed Publication

Kyoto University

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A distant view of the Üçağızlı II Cave in southern Türkiye.

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Credit: KyotoU / Naoki Morimoto

Kyoto, Japan -- Tens of thousands of years ago, our own species, Homo sapiens, coexisted with Neanderthals, Homo neanderthalensis. Many of us living today carry a small amount of Neanderthal DNA, indicating that the two species may have shared much more than just the same land. Now, a breakthrough archaeological discovery has revealed that the two species did not merely cross paths: they possibly shared a common culture that spanned over 20,000 years.

Humans migrated from our original home in Africa to other parts of the world in the Out of Africa event, but human fossils around this time have been scarce in the Levant, a primary corridor between Africa and Eurasia. In search of more evidence of both modern humans and Neanderthals, an international team of researchers -- including scientists from Türkiye, France, and Japan, including Kyoto University -- headed to Üçağızlı II Cave in southern Türkiye for excavations.

At this site, five years of meticulous millimeter-by-millimeter excavation revealed evidence of both species living in the same space, utilizing identical stone tool technologies and survival strategies. Remarkably, the evidence also suggests this shared behavior extended beyond practical aspects and included the use of non-utilitarian materials.

The researchers found that both Neanderthals and modern humans selectively collected a specific type of marine seashell that had virtually no value as food, and which had previously been associated exclusively with modern humans. This shared preference for a non-utilitarian, potentially symbolic object suggests that cultural exchange occurred across the biological divide, transcending species barriers.

"Our findings indicate a deep level of cultural interaction," says a corresponding author Naoki Morimoto of KyotoU. "These two distinct but closely related human groups were not just adapting to the same environment: they were probably sharing symbolic preferences."

The modern human fossils recovered from Üçağızlı II Cave date to a period between approximately 50,000 and 60,000 years ago, placing them broadly within the pivotal Out of Africa timeframe, which has been pinpointed genetically. This suggests that these individuals found between Eurasia and Africa may represent a close relative of the founding lineage of all living non-African populations today. Alternatively, they could be previously unknown survivors of an earlier, preceding wave of modern humans migrating into the Levant.

By capturing this critical window of co-existence, the discoveries at Üçağızlı II Cave fill a long-standing gap in the global archaeological and paleontological record, potentially rewriting our understanding of how early human species interacted, communicated, and shared their worlds with each other.

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The paper "Long-term cultural continuity across the Neanderthal–modern human sequence at Üçağızlı II Cave, northern Levant" appeared on 6 July 2026 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), with doi: 10.1073/pnas.2609061123

Early Americans’ primary diet was mammoths, other large mammals

Early humans in North and South America relied heavily on hunting of large mammals, including mammoths and giant ground sloths, for food and sustenance, according to newly published research by a team including two University of Wyoming archaeologists.

The findings by UW Professor Todd Surovell, Professor Emeritus Robert Kelly and colleagues from other institutions are the latest development in a long-running debate over the behaviors and movements of early Americans before the extinction of large, plant-eating animals -- such as mammoths, other elephant-like creatures, giant ground sloths and large camels -- between 11,000 and 13,000 years ago.

The new research -- published in the journal Science Advances -- also supports the idea that the animals’ extinction was due primarily to hunting by humans. The paper’s lead author is Ben Potter, of the University of Alaska-Fairbanks.

“Early Paleoindians were highly residentially mobile hunter-gatherers who used homogeneous technology and made unpatterned use of vast territories in the context of a rapid geographic expansion across numerous ecologically distinct regions of North and South America within a few hundred years,” the researchers wrote. “Focus on megaherbivores facilitated rapid human expansion into different ecosystems before the … extinction of megafauna led to regional diversification through adaptations to locally available resources.”

The new study focused on people in Eastern Beringia -- stretching from the Mackenzie River in Canada through Alaska and westward to the Bering Strait land bridge -- between 13,300-14,000 years ago; the so-called Clovis people in North America between 12,800-13,400 years ago; and the Fishtail projectile point people of South America between 11,600-12,900 years ago. The researchers synthesized the zooarchaeological records from sites in all of those regions -- including the La Prele Mammoth site in Wyoming, where Clovis people killed or scavenged a Columbian mammoth nearly 13,000 years ago -- to reach their conclusions.

For all three regions, the researchers estimate that at least 98 percent of these Early Paleondians’ diet came from the large mammals. That makes sense, according to the new paper, in part because large-bodied, fat-rich prey yields relatively more calories and nutrients than smaller animals.

Additionally, the researchers note that Early Beringian people -- likely the first to enter the Americas over the Bering land bridge, according to Surovell, Kelly and others -- encountered primarily large mammals, with few potential plant resources. There is no indication of fishing by these people in the archaeological record there. So those mammals were the humans’ primary food source, a relationship that continued as people moved southward through a passageway between the massive Laurentide and Cordilleran ice sheets in North America, running from modern-day Alaska through Alberta, Canada, to the Great Plains, between 12,000 and 13,000 years ago.

“When these megafauna-focused hunter-gatherers entered the midcontinent, they first encountered many of the same (and similar) species in very similar steppe-tundra ecosystems and used a similar subsistence and high-mobility strategy,” the researchers wrote. “While the timing of the opening and ecological viability of the Ice-Free Corridor remains unresolved, once it was open, woolly mammoth habitat extended through the Ice-Free Corridor from Beringia to the proglacial tundras of the midwest United States. Humans shifted their subsistence focus to very similar Columbian mammoth found throughout North America as far south as highland Central America and, to a lesser extent, mastodons and gomphotheres in other North American regions. (Fishtail projectile point) populations expanding through South America tracked similar megafaunal prey, including large ground sloths (mylodonts and megatheres) and gomphotheres, and other megafauna such as camelids and equids.”

The study acknowledges that other scientists have examined similar data but “interpret them in polar-opposite ways,” with those interpretations leading to conclusions that the early Americans were dietary generalists, not “megafauna specialists.” The new paper addresses some of the differing interpretations.

Specifically, Surovell, Kelly and colleagues say the argument that eating only large mammals would not sustain human populations nutritionally has been refuted by research showing that high-protein diets, known as keto diets, are in fact healthy.

“Except for the likely opportunistic consumption of easily obtainable fruits or nuts, these highly mobile Early Paleoindians apparently consumed a diet mostly of meats, including both protein and fat,” the researchers wrote.

Additionally, they say there’s a good reason that there’s little evidence of the early Americans accessing bone marrow from the animals they killed or scavenged: There was plenty of food to be had without processing the bones.

“The pattern of sometimes minimal bone processing is more consistent with megafauna specialist behaviors in a resource-rich environment, where meat and fat are easily obtainable, both off the carcass and in terms of higher encounter rates, both resulting in reduced energy costs,” the researchers wrote. “Overall, Early Paleoindian strategies indicate that it was more efficient to kill new animals than to fully process every kill.”

And arguments that the early humans weren’t capable of killing giant mammals don’t hold up to the evidence, the researchers say. The tools used in hunting -- such as Clovis points and Fishtail projectile points -- were definitely capable of penetrating the hide of mammoths through the use of atlatls and spears, and the Paleoindians likely hunted in groups to increase their rate of success.

“Archaeological evidence for Early Paleoindian subsistence, technology and mobility patterns supports the contention that the first continent-wide adaptive strategies in Eastern Beringia, subglacial North America and South America were big game specialists, not dietary generalists,” the paper concludes. “The pattern began with woolly mammoth exploitation in Western Beringia (Northern Siberia) in the steppe-tundra habitat and its continuation into Eastern Beringia (Alaska). Woolly mammoth habitat connected Beringia with the Ice-Free Corridor and the Great Lakes region, where hunters encountered a similar species, the Columbian mammoth, facilitating rapid expansion throughout North America.

“At the southern extremity of Columbia mammoth, as early populations entered Central America, they encountered new habitats and the megaherbivores giant ground sloths and gomphotheres. Early Paleoindians followed these new taxa through the new bottleneck of Panama into and throughout South America. The megafaunal specialization emphasis of Early Paleoindians allowed for rapid expansion requiring little change in overall adaptive strategies, resulting in the continent-wide similarities we observe in the Early Paleoindian record.”

Only when the large mammals became extinct -- primarily a result of overhunting -- did the early Americans vary their diets to include smaller mammals such as bison, waterfowl, birds, fish, shellfish and plants, the researchers say. 

New genomic study uncovers family ties linking Scythian elite burials across the Eurasian steppe

 

Ancient DNA reveals how political power and elite status may have been maintained among Iron Age nomadic societies

Peer-Reviewed Publication

Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

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Burial mound "Kurgan Shilikty 16" in Kazakhstan before the excavation works took place.

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Credit: © Rinat Zhumatayev

To the point

• Elite family networks: Ancient DNA reveals close family relationships linking elite individuals across multiple Scythian kurgans, suggesting that high social status may have been inherited through family lineages.
• Golden Man genome: The study includes the first genome-wide data from the famous Scythian Saka “Golden Man” of the Issyk archaeological site in Kazakhstan.
• Inherited status: Elite individuals were more related to each other, even when buried at different sites, than to lower-status individuals buried at the same sites.
• Elite women: Nearly half of the elite individuals in the dataset were female, indicating that women could attain high social status within Iron Age Scythian society.
• Social organization: The study finds no clear evidence that elite status was associated with either patrilocal or matrilocal residence patterns, suggesting complex forms of social organization among Scythian elites.

A new ancient DNA study published in Science Advances provides evidence that political power among Scythian elites may have been inherited through family lineages that extended across multiple burial sites. By combining archaeology, anthropology and genetics, the new study offers fresh insight into how social inequality and political authority developed among ancient nomadic societies.

The Scytho-Siberian archaeological horizon emerged during the first millennium BCE and stretched from the Altai mountains to the Black Sea. The Scythians have been portrayed as highly mobile horse-riding nomads who traveled the vast Eurasian steppe during Iron Age. Across the Eurasian steppe, the Iron Age witnessed the appearance of large burial mounds, built for high status individuals. These elaborately constructed monumental graves often contained richly adorned women and men accompanied by gold ornaments, weapons and scarified animals.

In contrast, other individuals were buried in much smaller and simpler mounds with few or no grave goods. Such striking differences have long been interpreted as evidence of growing social inequality and the emergence of powerful elites among the Iron Age population. However, one essential question has remained unanswered: how was elite status maintained and transmitted? Were positions of power earned through individual achievement or were they inherited?

The new study analyzes genome-wide DNA from 85 Iron Age individuals, including 38 elite and 47 non-elite individuals from across Central Eurasia. The study includes 46 newly sequenced genomes and the first genome-wide data from the famous Scythian Saka “Golden Man” of the Issyk archaeological site in Kazakhstan, one of the most outstanding archaeological discoveries of the Central Eurasian steppe.

Golden Man

One of the most significant discoveries from the Central Eurasian steppe is the Issyk kurgans in Kazakhstan, located about 50 km east of Almaty. Excavations of this royal burial complex associated with the Iron Age Saka culture revealed the “Golden Man” burial dating to 400–300 BCE. The individual was buried in a wooden chamber containing more than 4000 gold ornaments, weapons, gold embroidered headdress, zoomorphic artifacts, and a silver bowl with unknown writing.

In this study, genome-wide data from the “Golden Man” provides the first genetic insight from this iconic individual. The results place him within the genetic variation of Iron Age Saka individuals and also helps to resolve a long-standing question by indicating that the individual was most likely male than female.

Family ties across elite burials

By analyzing ancient genomes from individuals buried in elite Scythian graves and comparing them to non-elite burials, a team of international researchers have identified evidence of close family relationships linking elite individuals across multiple cemeteries, in some cases more than 100 km apart, as well as signs of unions between relatives. These results indicate that elite status was maintained within interconnected family lineages, that shaped political authority and social organization across Central Eurasian steppe.

“We did not expect to find that social status was passed down from generation to generation but it was clear that high-status individuals were more related to each other, even when buried at different archaeological sites, than to people of lower status who were buried at the same sites with the elites” says Ainash Childebayeva, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at UT Austin and a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and the Institute of Genetics and Physiology.

The researchers found no clear evidence that elite status was associated with either patrilocal or matrilocal residence patterns, suggesting that social organizing among Scythian elites were more complex and not based on gender differentiation.

Elite women in Scythian society

The study also sheds new light on the role of elite women in Scythian society. “An important observation from our study was the noticeable presence of elite women” says Ayshin Ghalichi. “Nearly half of the elite individuals in our dataset were female, indicating that women held high social status within Iron Age Scythian society.“

The presence of elite women in richly furnished graves, together with genomic evidence linking high-status individuals across burial sites, points to a social world in which status, authority and kinship were closely connected. The findings suggest that political authority among Iron Age Scythian groups may have been organized through extended elite family networks rather than through simple residence patterns based on either male or female lines.

Leyla Djansugurova from the Institute of Genetics and Physiology in Almaty, Kazakhstan, explains the broader cultural significance of the study: “Scythians and Sakas are collective names for nomadic tribes of the early Iron Age who inhabited the Central Eurasian region from the Danube to the Altai. The ancient Greeks called them ‘Scythians’ (Herodotus coined the term), while Persian and Indian sources called them ‘Sakas’. Historically, the term Scythians more often refers to the western tribes (Black Sea region), and Sakas to the eastern ones (Central Asia, Altai). All these tribes were united by the so-called Scythian-Saka animal style in art, a distinctive military skill, and nomadic herding. They did not have their own written language, but they left behind grand burial mounds, the study of which has shaped the global understanding of the culture of the nomadic peoples of Eurasia during this period. The most striking example of the Scythian-Saka culture is the ‘Golden Man’ from the Issyk burial mound, which has become the national symbol of Kazakhstan. Many other Golden Men/Women finds by Kazakh archaeologists are known. The value of this genetic study not only estimated by the fact of obtaining the first reliable DNA data on numerous objects belonging to the Saka elite, such as the Golden Man from the Issyk burial mound, the Urzhar Princess, the Shilikty Golden Man, and others, but also by the fact that Scythian-Saka elite individuals were being examined alongside non-elite individuals found at the same sites. This approach has allowed to determine the specifics of elite marital relationships and identify related necropolises. Thus, this genetic study significantly enriches our knowledge of the Scythian-Saka culture.”

By integrating archaeological, anthropological and genomic evidence, the study reveals that Scythian elite society was shaped by family ties extending across burial sites and regions. These findings provide new insight into how high status was maintained, how political authority developed, and how social inequality emerged among ancient nomadic societies of the Eurasian steppe.

 

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Journal

Science Advances

DOI

10.1126/sciadv.aef0108 

Were Clovis foragers big-game hunters, or just big-game scavengers?

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Clovis fluted points from Blackwater Draw, New Mexico.

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Credit: Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports

There are currently 15 well-documented Late Pleistocene localities in North America in which Clovis points are found associated with proboscidean remains (of mammoth, mastodon, and gomphothere). Archaeologists routinely assume these localities represent evidence that Clovis people hunted these multi-tone animals, and in turn invoke that evidence to claim humans had a role in the extinction of these large mammals. Yet, archaeologists have not thoroughly tested their assumption, nor fully considered the possibility that Clovis foragers were facultative scavengers, which might as readily account for the association of artifacts with proboscidean remains at some or even all these localities. A significant obstacle to differentiating hunting from scavenging archaeologically is the challenge of equifinality.

Five researchers from Kent State University, Southern Methodist University (SMU), the Smithsonian, the University of Michigan, and the University of Utah explored whether Clovis foragers hunted, scavenged, or did both, and whether it was possible to tell the difference archaeologically. The new research is now published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.

To set a broad foundation for considering the question, they began their study showing the near ubiquity of scavenging among non-human animals. They document the fact that the paleoanthropological, ethnohistoric, and ethnographic records showed that scavenging was also quite common among human groups past and present. Following that, they consider the many opportunities scavengers have – and Clovis foragers might have had – in exploiting proboscidean carrion. Lastly, they assess the proposed archaeological evidence for Clovis hunting and scavenging and show that while Clovis foragers likely practiced both. “Researchers cannot currently distinguish the two archaeologically and thus cannot reliably show how many Clovis proboscidean sites represent hunting versus scavenging events,” said Kent State’s Metin I. Eren.

“While Clovis foragers likely hunted mammoths, it would be odd indeed if Clovis foragers – alone among ethnohistoric and ethnographic human groups and nearly all omnivores and carnivores – did not scavenge,” said SMU’s David J. Meltzer. Meltzer added that “scavenging also could possibly explain the high δ15N values recently reported for the Anzick child, which could readily result from his mother eating maggots and not mammoth meat.” The researchers concluded that given the present state of knowledge, the Clovis archaeological record cannot be used to argue that Clovis groups routinely hunted proboscideans, or that there are sufficient “kill sites” to support a human role in proboscidean extinctions.

The Smithsonian’s Briana Pobiner, the University of Utah’s James O’Connell, and the University of Michigan’s John D. Speth were the other contributing authors to the study.

“If we cannot definitively conclude that proboscidean killing took place at any single Clovis site because there is archaeological equifinality with scavenging, then proboscidean overkilling is not supported either,” Eren said. “Despite some archaeologists’ and other scientists’ long-standing beliefs, there is just no definitive scientific evidence for a human role in the North American Late Pleistocene extinction of proboscideans.”

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Journal

Journal of Archaeological Science Reports

DOI

10.1016/j.jasrep.2026.105896