Study casts doubt on ‘incestuous royalty’ in Neolithic Ireland

FacebookXLinkedInWeChatBlueskyMessageWhatsAppEmail

 

image: 

The Newgrange prehistoric monument in Ireland is a large circular mound containing a chamber. 

view more 

Credit: Photo credit: TJP Finn CC BY-SA 4.0

New research has cast doubts over suggestions an incestuous social elite ruled over the ancient people of Ireland more than 5,000 years ago.

Researchers examined the evidence from burials of individuals at the Newgrange prehistoric monument in Ireland - a large circular mound containing a chamber where cremated and unburnt human remains were placed, the discovery of which led to speculation that those buried there must have been from an elite class or a royal family.

In 2020, the DNA analysis of a bone skull fragment found in the chamber, however, suggested that at least one of the individuals buried there was the result of a relationship between two siblings or a parent and child, and was also distantly related to others buried in the chamber.

It is believed that only particular individuals were buried in the chamber and therefore they must have held a ‘special’ position in society.  The assumption was that if an individual born of incest was placed in the chamber, that this practice must have been ‘accepted’ by society, possibly because it was ‘common’ among a ruling elite.

A research team, including the University of York and University College Dublin, however, have now shown that there is no corroborating evidence in nearby settlements, dietary practices, or trade, that an elite existed either economically or socially.

Researchers now believe the society at the time was more equal, based on the fact that they appeared to share and exchange resources, as well as live in similar dwellings.

Professor Penny Bickle from the University of York’s Department of Archaeology, said: “The evidence all points to a much more collective ethos. There are not wide disparities in diet, houses are relatively flimsy, and all similar to each other.  

“There are no large settlement systems or trade mechanisms, and we also don’t see production of craft on the scale that we see in other ancient societies such as in Ancient Egypt, where incest was  thought to be practiced by the ruling elite.

“We can only begin to understand these monuments and tombs if we examine the social lives or the communities that built and use them, and when we start to do this, this idea of a ‘social elite’ or a form of royalty starts to appear less likely.”

Older than Stonehenge and the Pyramids of Giza, Newgrange is believed to have been built by a farming community that prospered in the Boyne Valley, County Meath, some 5,000 years ago.  Newgrange was rediscovered in AD 1699 and its interior had been heavily disturbed prior to its modern excavation in the 1960s, and so researchers question whether this was even the original burial place of the skull fragment, referred to as NG10, dated to 3340 - 3020 BC.

The genetic clustering in passage tombs, such as at Newgrange, typically reflects very distant biological relationships - like second cousins or great-great-great-grandparents - rather than close familial ties.  To establish if the tombs were reserved for an elite, researchers say they would expect much closer genetic ties than they have seen at Newgrange. 

It is more likely that these tombs were places that reflect family, work, and other social relationships, rather than the mark of an elite family group. 

Associate Professor Jessica Smyth, from University College Dublin, said: “People were definitely being selected for burial in passage tombs - the whole community does not end up in these monuments. However, we don’t know the reasons behind this selection, and why they were thought to be special.

“Unlike today, bodies don’t tend to be buried ‘whole’ or ‘intact’ in this time period. Before they end up in megalithic monuments, bodies are broken down, sometimes cremated and even circulated around their communities.”

As so many of the dead found in these passage tombs were broken down and mixed with cremated remains, and possibly moved around to different places in the landscape, it is not clear the people who placed NG10 fragment in Newgrange knew who they were in life or who the parents of this individual were, casting further doubt on how ‘special’ the individual might have been. 

Professor Penny Bickle said: “It is by no means clear that the monument was the first burial site of NG10 and the tomb grew in stages, so tracing who this individual was is a very difficult task indeed.  As it stands the incestuous origins of NG10 is a one-off compared to all of the DNA data we have for Neolithic Ireland.

“There are still many questions to solve here, but building this picture means looking at the monument together with the society that was built up around it, and from this, we get a step closer to understanding a community that was much more inclusive and equal than previously thought.”

The research is published in the journal Antiquity.

Ancient DNA reveals new clues about the incredible journey of dogs in the Americas

• New study shows dogs journeyed south not with the first hunter-gatherers, but with mobile farming communities who were transforming the landscape 

• Some modern Chihuahuas still carry DNA from their pre-contact Mesoamerican ancestors over 1500 years ago 

A major new study has traced the incredible journey of humankind’s best friend across the Americas, showing how dogs slowly spread southward alongside early farming societies - mirroring the rhythms of human migration, agriculture and cultural change. 

Led by Dr Aurélie Manin from the School of Archaeology at the University of Oxford, an international team of scientists sequenced 70 complete mitochondrial genomes from archaeological and modern dogs, collected from Central Mexico to Central Chile and Argentina.  

The study reveals that all pre-contact dogs in Central and South America descended from a single maternal lineage that diverged from North American dogs after humans first arrived on the continent. 

Rather than dispersing rapidly, dogs followed a slower path - what scientists call ‘isolation by distance’ - gradually adapting to new environments as they moved with people through the Americas between 7,000 and 5,000 years ago, in step with the spread of maize cultivation by early farming communities. 

While the arrival of Europeans introduced new dog lineages that largely replaced indigenous ones, the team found that some modern Chihuahuas still carry maternal DNA from their pre-contact Mesoamerican ancestors. These rare genetic echoes highlight an enduring legacy of the first American dogs, and the deep roots of this iconic breed. 

‘This study reinforces the important role of early agrarian societies in the spread of dogs worldwide. In the Americas, we show that their spread was slow enough to allow the dogs to structure genetically between north, central and south America. It is rather uncommon for domestic animals and it opens new research avenues on the relationship that existed between dogs and these early agrarian societies,’ said Dr Manin. 

The study, ‘Ancient dog mitogenomes support the dual dispersal of dogs and agriculture into South America’ is published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, adds a new chapter to the long, shared history of dogs and humans - one shaped by movement, survival, and enduring companionship across continents. 

Before dispersing out of Africa, humans learned to thrive in diverse habitats

 

Peer-Reviewed Publication

Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology

FacebookXLinkedInWeChatBlueskyMessageWhatsAppEmail

 

image: 

Humans learned to thrive in a variety of African environments before their successful expansion into Eurasia roughly 50,000 years ago.

view more 

Credit: Ondrej Pelanek and Martin Pelanek

Today, all non-Africans are known to have descended from a small group of people that ventured into Eurasia after around 50 thousand years ago. However, fossil evidence shows that there were numerous failed dispersals before this time that left no detectable traces in living people.

In a paper published in Nature this week, new evidence for the first time explains why those earlier migrations didn’t succeed. A consortium of scientists led by Prof. Eleanor Scerri of the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Germany, and Prof. Andrea Manica of the University of Cambridge has found that before expanding into Eurasia 50 thousand years ago, humans began to exploit different habitat types in Africa in ways not seen before.

“We assembled a dataset of archaeological sites and environmental information covering the last 120 thousand years in Africa. We used methods developed in ecology to understand changes in human environmental niches, the habitats humans can use and thrive in, during this time,” says Dr Emily Hallett of Loyola University Chicago, co-lead author of the study.

“Our results showed that the human niche began to expand significantly from 70 thousand years ago, and that this expansion was driven by humans increasing their use of diverse habitat types, from forests to arid deserts,” adds Dr Michela Leonardi of London’s Natural History Museum, the study’s other lead author.

“This is a key result.” explains Professor Manica, “Previous dispersals seem to have happened during particularly favourable windows of increased rainfall in the Saharo-Arabian desert belt, thus creating ‘green corridors’ for people to move into Eurasia. However, around 70,000-50,000 years ago, the easiest route out of Africa would have been more challenging than during previous periods, and yet this expansion was sizeable and ultimately successful.”

Many explanations for the uniquely successful dispersal out of Africa have been made, from technological innovations to immunities granted by admixture with Eurasian hominins. However, no technological innovations have been apparent, and previous admixture events do not appear to have saved older human dispersals out of Africa.

Here the researchers show that humans greatly increased the breadth of habitats they were able to exploit within Africa before the expansion out of the continent. This increase in the human niche may have been a result of a positive feedback of greater contact and cultural exchange, allowing larger ranges and the breakdown of geographic barriers.

“Unlike previous humans dispersing out of Africa, those human groups moving into Eurasia after ~60-50 thousand years ago were equipped with a distinctive ecological flexibility as a result of coping with climatically challenging habitats,” says Prof. Scerri, “This likely provided a key mechanism for the adaptive success of our species beyond their African homeland.”

The research was supported by funding from the Max Planck Society, European Research Council and Leverhulme Trust.

---

Journal

Nature

DOI

10.1038/s41586-025-09154-0 

Earliest evidence of humans in the Americas confirmed in new study

 

Vance Holliday jumped at the invitation to go do geology at New Mexico's White Sands. The landscape, just west of Alamogordo, looks surreal – endless, rolling dunes of fine beige gypsum, left behind by ancient seas. It's one of the most unique geologic features in the world.

But a national park protects much of the area's natural resources, and the U.S. Army uses an adjacent swath as a missile range, making research at White Sands impossible much of the time. So it was an easy call for Holliday, a University of Arizona archaeologist and geologist, to accept an invitation in 2012 to do research in the park. While he was there, he asked, skeptically, if he could look at a site on the missile range.

"Well, next thing I know, there we were on the missile range," he said.

Holliday and a graduate student spent several days examining geologic layers in trenches, dug by previous researchers, to piece together a timeline for the area. They had no idea that, about 100 yards away, were footprints, preserved in ancient clay and buried under gypsum, that would help spark a wholly new theory about when humans arrived in the Americas.

Researchers from Bournemouth University in the United Kingdom and the U.S. National Park Service excavated those footprints in 2019 and published their paper in 2021. Holliday did not participate in the excavation but became a co-author after some of his 2012 data helped date the footprints.

The tracks showed human activity in the area occurred between 23,000 and 21,000 years ago – a timeline that would upend anthropologists' understanding of when cultures developed in North America. It would make the prints about 10,000 years older than remains found 90 years ago at a site near Clovis, New Mexico, which gave its name to an artifact assemblage long understood by archaeologists to represent the earliest known culture in North America. Critics have spent the last four years questioning the 2021 findings, largely arguing that the ancient seeds and pollen in the soil used to date the footprints were unreliable markers.

Now, Holliday leads a new study that supports the 2021 findings – this time relying on ancient mud to radiocarbon date the footprints, not seeds and pollen, and an independent lab to make the analysis. The paper was published today in the journal Science Advances.

Specifically, the new paper finds that the mud is between 20,700 and 22,400 years old – which correlates with the original finding that the footprints are between 21,000 and 23,000 years old. The new study now marks the third type of material – mud in addition to seeds and pollen – used to date the footprints, and by three different labs. Two separate research groups now have a total of 55 consistent radiocarbon dates.

"It's a remarkably consistent record," said Holliday, a professor emeritus in the School of Anthropology and Department of Geosciences who has studied the "peopling of the Americas" for nearly 50 years, focusing largely on the Great Plains and the Southwest.

"You get to the point where it's really hard to explain all this away," he added. "As I say in the paper, it would be serendipity in the extreme to have all these dates giving you a consistent picture that's in error."

Millennia ago, White Sands was a series of lakes that eventually dried up. Wind erosion piled the gypsum into the dunes that define the area today. The footprints were excavated in the beds of a stream that flowed into one such ancient lake.

"The wind erosion destroyed part of the story, so that part is just gone," Holliday said. "The rest is buried under the world's biggest pile of gypsum sand."

For the latest study, Holliday and Jason Windingstad, a doctoral candidate in environmental science, returned to White Sands in 2022 and 2023 and dug a new series of trenches for a closer look at the geology of the lake beds. Windingstad had worked at White Sands as a consulting geoarchaeologist for other research teams when he agreed to join Holliday's study.

"It's a strange feeling when you go out there and look at the footprints and see them in person," Windingstad said. "You realize that it basically contradicts everything that you've been taught about the peopling of North America."

Holliday acknowledges that the new study doesn't address a question he's heard from critics since 2021: Why are there no signs of artifacts or settlements left behind by those who made the footprints?

It's a fair question, Holliday and Windingstad said, and Holliday still does not have a peer-reviewed answer. Some of the footprints uncovered for the 2021 study were part of trackways that would have taken just a few seconds to walk, Holliday estimates. It's perfectly reasonable, he said, to assume that hunter-gatherers would be careful not to leave behind any resources in such a short time frame.

"These people live by their artifacts, and they were far away from where they can get replacement material. They're not just randomly dropping artifacts," he said. "It's not logical to me that you're going to see a debris field."

Even though he was confident in the 2021 findings to begin with, Holliday said, he's glad to have more data to support them.

"I really had no doubt from the outset because the dating we had was already consistent," Holliday said. "We have direct data from the field – and a lot of it now."

Australia’s oldest occupied Ice Age cave found at high elevation in Blue Mountains

New evidence aligns Australia with global data showing glacial landscapes were not necessarily natural barriers to early human movement and occupation

FacebookXLinkedInWeChatBlueskyMessageWhatsAppEmail

 

image: 

Dargan Shelter, ancient cave in Blue Mountains, Australia

view more 

Credit: University of Sydney

Archaeologists from the Australian Museum, the University of Sydney and the Australian National University in collaboration with First Nations community members have unearthed 693 stone artefacts dating from the last Ice Age to the recent past. Found in an ancient Blue Mountains cave known as Dargan Shelter, this new evidence provides definitive proof of repeated occupation in this once frozen, high-altitude landscape.  
 
The research, funded by the Australian Museum Foundation, is published in Nature Human Behaviour today. 

The Blue Mountains, home to some of the oldest known rock shelters in Australia, have been inhabited for over 30,000 years but this is the highest cave found showing past human activity. 

Dating back 20,000 years, when the upper reaches of the Blue Mountains were treeless and seasonally frozen over, Dargan Shelter at 1073m elevation is believed to be the oldest occupied high-altitude landscape in Australia. Until now, researchers thought the Australian high country was too difficult to occupy during the last Ice Age. However, these new archaeological results provide the first evidence of repeated human activity and adaption to periglacial environments on the Australian continent. 
 

Gomeroi knowledge holder and First Nations mentor in archaeology at the University of Sydney, Wayne Brennan, who is a rock art specialist, initiated the research project. Mr Brennan united scientists with First Nations community to explore the cultural history of the Blue Mountains and to improve conservation outcomes for this important cultural landscape. 

 

Mr Brennan and lead author of the research paper Dr Amy Mosig Way, who holds a joint position as archaeologist at the Australian Museum and lecturer in Archaeology at the University of Sydney, worked closely with First Nations members from the Dharug, Wiradjuri, Dharawal, Gomeroi, Wonnarua, and Ngunnawal groups, who hold traditional connections to the region.  

 

Dr Way said the research indicates that First Nations ancestors were able to navigate and occupy high-altitude periglacial environments during the Ice Age.  
 
“This new evidence aligns Australia with global data that shows glacial landscapes were not necessarily natural barriers to early human movement and occupation,” Dr Way said.                                             

“Until now, we thought the Australian high country was too difficult to occupy during the last Ice Age. Yet, despite the harsh conditions, our research demonstrates people were moving in and through this high elevation landscape, which is approximately 400m above the tree line.” 

 

Second author of the paper, Professor Philip Piper from the School of Archaeology and Anthropology at the Australian National University, said the excavations uncovered an incredible depositional sequence of in situ human activity, including hearth features.  

 

“It was the excellent state of preservation that enabled us to construct such a robust chronology for Dargan Shelter spanning the last 20,000 years,” Professor Piper said. 

 

First Nations custodians, authors on the research paper and proud Dharug women, Leanne Watson Redpath and Erin Wilkins explained that their communities have lived in the Blue Mountains for thousands of years. 

 

“Our people have walked, lived and thrived in the Blue Mountains for thousands of years and we knew the cave was there. It is not only a tangible connection to our ancestors who used it as a meeting place for sharing, storytelling and survival, but is a part of our cultural identity. We need to respect and protect our heritage for the benefit of all Australians,” Watson Redpath said. 

 

“While there’s no certain way of identifying which groups accessed the mountains in the deep past, it is likely that multiple groups were connected to this country. Today, Dargan Shelter is considered by local custodians to represent a family space of high cultural significance,” said Erin Wilkins.  

 

“The Blue Mountains is a UNESCO World Heritage listed site for the protection of flora and fauna but there are no safeguards for our cultural heritage. We hope that by combining our traditional knowledge with scientific research, we can protect these invaluable storehouses of our history for generations to come,” Brennan said.  

 

Dr Way said the study builds on research conducted by Australian Museum archaeologists, beginning with Frederick McCarthy in 1935, Professor Paul Taçon and, most recently, Dr Val Attenbrow, augmenting previous findings and collections within the Australian Museum.  

 
Advancing Indigenous Australian archaeology 
 

The University of Sydney is deeply committed to First Nations archaeology. Dr Way and Mr Brennan are funded by the Tom Austen Brown Bequest which advances research and teaching in Indigenous Australian and other archaeologies.  
 
Dr Way also coordinates an undergraduate unit titled Archaeology in the Field (ARCO3404). Third-year students from this unit, along with students from Australian National University, participated in the excavation of the Dargan Shelter and contributed to its broader research program.  
 

Mr Brennan, a proud Gomeroi man and First Nations mentor in the Discipline of Archaeology, provides ongoing support and guidance to First Nations students studying archaeology. He also supports non-Indigenous students working with First Nations communities and collections, fostering respectful and collaborative engagement. 

KEY POINTS: 

• Archaeologists have found the oldest human occupied Pleistocene site at high elevation in the Blue Mountains NSW, dating back to 20,000 years 

• human artefacts, such as stone tools for cutting or scraping and a sandstone grinding slab that may have been used for shaping wooden artefacts (needles, awls, or bone points for spears), were found in the frozen layers of the site 

• these results align the Australian continent for the first time with global findings that cold climates did not prevent humans from travelling and making shelters at these altitudes. 

---

Journal

Nature Human Behaviour

DOI

10.1038/s41562-025-02180-y 

The European Huns had ancient Siberian roots

University of Cologne

FacebookXLinkedInWeChatBlueskyMessageWhatsAppEmail

 

image: 

On the River Yelogui, a tributary of the Yenisei in Siberia. A few speakers of a Yenisei language, Ket, still live in the region. The language of the European Huns belonged to the same language family.

view more 

Credit: Edward Vajda

New linguistic findings show that the European Huns had Palaeo-Siberian ancestors and do not, as previously assumed, originate from Turkic-speaking groups. That is the result of a joint study by Dr Svenja Bonmann at the University of Cologne’s Department of Linguistics and Dr Simon Fries at the Faculty of Classics and the Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics at the University of Oxford. The results of the study ‘Linguistic evidence suggests that Xiōng-nú and Huns spoke the same Paleo-Siberian language’ have been published in the journal Transactions of the Philological Society.

On the basis of various linguistic sources, the researchers reconstructed that the ethnic core of the Huns – including Attila and his European ruling dynasty – and their Asian ancestors, the so-called Xiongnu, shared a common language. This language belongs to the Yeniseian language family, a subgroup of the so-called Palaeo-Siberian languages. These languages were spoken in Siberia before the invasion of Uralic, Turkic and Tungusic ethnic groups. Even today, small groups who speak a Yeniseian language still reside along the banks of the Yenisei River in Russia.

From the third century BCE to the second century CE, the Xiongnu formed a loose tribal confederation in Inner Asia. A few years ago, during archaeological excavations in Mongolia, a city was discovered that is believed to be Long Cheng, the capital of the Xiongnu empire. The Huns, in turn, established a relatively short-lived but influential multi-ethnic empire in southeastern Europe from the fourth to fifth centuries CE. Research has shown that they came from Inner Asia, but their ethnic and linguistic origins have been disputed until now, as no written documents in their own language have survived. A great deal of what we know about the Huns and the Xiongnu is therefore based on written documents about them in other languages; for example, the term ‘Xiōng-nú’ derives from Chinese.

From the seventh century CE, Turkic peoples expanded westwards. It was therefore assumed that the Xiongnu and the ethnic core of the Huns, whose own westward expansion dates back to the fourth century CE, also spoke a Turkic language. However, Bonmann and Fries have found various linguistic indications that these groups spoke an early form of Arin, a Yeniseian language, in Inner Asia around the turn of the millennium. “This was long before the Turkic peoples migrated to Inner Asia and even before the splitting of Old Turkic into several daughter languages. This ancient Arin language even influenced the early Turkic languages and enjoyed a certain prestige in Inner Asia. This implies that Old Arin was probably the native language of the Xiongnu ruling dynasty,” says Dr Svenja Bonmann from the University of Cologne.

Bonmann and Fries analysed linguistic data based on loan words, glosses in Chinese texts, proper names of the Hun dynasty as well as place and water names. Taken by itself, the data on each of these aspects would have comparatively little significance, but taken together it is hard to argue with the conclusion that both the ruling dynasty of the Xiongnu and the ethnic core of the Huns spoke Old Arin.

The findings of the study also made it possible for the first time to reconstruct how the Huns came to settle in Europe: For the two researchers, place and water names still prove today that an Arin-speaking population once left its mark on Inner Asia and migrated westwards from the Altai-Sayan region. Attila the Hun probably also bears an ancient Arin name: Until now, ‘Attila’ was thought to be a Germanic nickname (‘little father’), but according to the new study, ’Attila’ could also be interpreted as a Yeniseian epithet, which roughly translates as ‘swift-ish, quick-ish’.

The new linguistic findings support earlier genetic and archaeological findings that the European Huns are descendants of the Xiongnu. “Our study shows that alongside archaeology and genetics comparative philology plays an essential role in the exploration of human history. We hope that our findings will inspire further research into the history of lesser-known languages and thereby contribute further to our understanding of the linguistic evolution of mankind,” Dr Simon Fries from the University of Oxford concludes.

---

Journal

Transactions of the Philological Society

DOI

10.1111/1467-968X.12321