New discoveries from Australia's oldest known underwater archaeological record reveal how First Peoples lived, transported goods and used different places within a vast cultural landscape that was submerged when rising seas transformed the continent after the last Ice Age.
Published in the prestigious journal Quaternary Science Reviews, compelling new evidence shows that significant Aboriginal cultural heritage survives on Australia's seabed. It also shows that earlier discoveries at Murujuga, in north-western Australia, were not isolated finds but part of a broader submerged cultural landscape across this World Heritage-listed region.
The discoveries, which include stone artefacts associated with an ancient freshwater spring, provide insights into a world that existed before rising seas reshaped Australia's coastline.
While the sites were submerged at least 9,000 years ago, the artefacts could be considerably older.
At the heart of this discovery is a partnership between underwater archaeology researchers from Flinders University, The University of Western Australia, James Cook University and University of York (UK) with Murujuga Aboriginal Corporation and its Rangers, who trained as scientific divers and worked alongside archaeologists to locate and document the underwater cultural sites.
“The collaboration demonstrates the value of working beside trained Indigenous Rangers who actively contributed to this challenging scientific research,” says lead researcher and specialist in marine archaeology, Professor Jonathan Benjamin from Flinders University’s College of Human Sciences and Culture.
Malik Churnside and Richard Variakojis – Rangers from the Murujuga Aboriginal Corporation, Land and Sea Unit and co-authors on the paper – undertook scientific diver surveys and made some of the underwater discoveries.
“The Ngarda-Ngarli people have cared for Murujuga for at least 50,000 years. What this research shows is that our cultural landscape extends far beyond the shoreline and into Sea Country, where important parts of our story remain preserved beneath the sea,” says Vincent Adams, Director, Murujuga Aboriginal Corporation.
“World Heritage recognition brings new responsibilities as well as global recognition. Research like this strengthens our ability to identify, understand and protect the whole Murujuga cultural landscape, including Country that was submerged when sea levels rose thousands of years ago.
More than two million square kilometres of Australia's continental shelf was submerged as sea levels rose following the end of the last Ice Age. Before that transformation, generations of First Nations peoples lived across landscapes that now lie beneath the ocean.
The newly documented sites reveal two distinct parts of this lost world. One site centres on a freshwater spring, a vital resource that would have been a place where people would congregate. The other is associated with a rocky hill overlooking an ancient river channel, showing how people used different parts of the landscape when the archipelago was still connected by dry land.
Analysis indicates some artefacts were made from stone sourced from around Rosemary Island, about 23 kilometres from where they were found, which suggests people moved valuable resources across a landscape that is now seabed.
For centuries, dogs have helped people travel across the Arctic, hauling supplies, equipment, and other goods through snowy landscapes where other domesticated animals struggled to venture. Now, a new study publishing October 14 in the Cell Press journal iScience finds that sled dogs might have evolved shorter legs that helped them pull loads more efficiently. By examining the ancient remains of ritually buried dogs, the team found that both current sled dogs and dogs that were alive 2,000 ago had 6% shorter leg bones than other similar species—a finding that could help researchers trace the origins of sled dogs and better understand how dog-powered transportation spread across the cold regions of the world over the past 9,000 years.
“Sled dogs have played an indispensable role in communities in the Arctic,” says first author Mitya Kletzerman of the University of Haifa in Israel. “Without dogs, people couldn’t move as efficiently to hunt, relocate as conditions changed, or travel between communities to exchange knowledge and share new ideas. Understanding how the practice evolved could give us new insights into how people adapted to life in the Arctic.”
The earliest archaeological evidence associated with dog sledding dates back to the early Holocene, about 9,000 years ago, on Zhokhov Island in modern-day Russia, where researchers found sled parts alongside dog remains. But because sledding equipment is rarely found in the archaeological record, it has remained difficult to determine when and where the practice first emerged or spread.
Previous research has shown that human-associated work can leave traces in an animal’s skeleton. For example, reindeer used for racing, carrying loads, and pulling have limb bone differences compared to their non-working counterparts. Kletzerman’s team wondered whether sled dogs also developed certain skeletal traits that helped them adapt to the physical demands of pulling a sled.
To investigate, the team developed a biomechanical model to understand how a dog’s body handles the work of pulling a sled. Their model showed that one effective way to pull a loaded sled is for a dog to lower its center of gravity, thereby increasing its ability to generate pulling force.
“When people or animals pull a load, it tends to tip them backward. A lower or more forward position of the center of mass counteracts this effect, allowing greater pulling force,” Kletzerman says.
The researchers then tested whether modern sled dogs have skeletal proportions that lower their center of mass. They analyzed bones in 60 canids, including sled dogs, wolves, mongrels, and spitzes. They compared the lengths of five long bones: the humerus, radius, and ulna in their forelegs, and the femur and tibia in the hind legs.
After accounting for overall skeletal size, the researchers found that sled dogs had relatively shorter radius, ulna, and tibia bones than non-sled canids, with these bones measuring about 6% shorter on average.
“It’s unclear how this trait developed, but selective pressure may have preserved it, because it gave sled dogs an advantage over other dogs,” Kletzerman says.
To understand whether this characteristic already existed in ancient dogs, the team examined 82 ancient dog bones and three skeletons of ritually buried dogs from three archaeological sites associated with ancestral Inuit populations in present-day Chukotka, Russia, dating from about 2,000 to 500 years ago.
About 89% of the bones were classified as consistent with the modern sled-dog pattern of shorter leg bones, as were all three ritually buried dogs. The findings suggest that this skeletal pattern could be an effective way to identify possible sled dogs even when archaeological remains are incomplete or lack direct evidence of sled equipment.
“Dogs have been working alongside humans for thousands of years, but we’re only beginning to understand how that partnership shaped them,” Kletzerman says.
LAWRENCE — The area of water between Russia and North America and the Pacific and Arctic oceans is now known as the Bering Strait. Yet it was once what we call the Bering Land Bridge, an exposed land and maritime region that connected Asia to North America.
The Bering Land Bridge formed 35,000 years ago, eventually disappearing under rising sea levels around 12,000 years ago. But the humans and creatures who inhabited the territory have left behind plenty of archaeological evidence of their presence.
“It’s fascinating to me how people have evolved and how our meager beginnings as hunter-gatherers have led to where we are now,” said Kelly Graf, professor of anthropology at the University of Kansas.
Graf is part of a team of researchers who have spent years studying this region, leading to a new article titled “Highlights from an early base camp in Beringia 13,800 years ago: Shég’ Xdaltth’i’ and the Late Pleistocene Peopling of Alaska.” This site in Alaska contains three early archaeological components dating to 13,800, 13,000 and 12,700 thousand years ago, revealing important information about late-glacial peopling and settling-in behavior in this far northern setting. The article appears in Science Advances.
The name Shég’ Xdaltth’i’ (pronounced shehg xuh-tuhl-th’ee) means “they were there” in Alaska Native Athabascan.
“The site is on a small ridge that overlooks the Tanana River, which is a major river system of the region. Today there are spruce trees all around. During the last part of the Pleistocene — the Ice Age — it was covered by shrub-tundra vegetation,” said Graf, who co-wrote the paper with Ted Goebel, KU professor of anthropology and department chair; KU doctoral student Mia Harbort and KU undergraduate Mason Sewing, along with other academics from the U.S. and Europe.
Graf said Beringia is full of evidence showcasing the hunting of megafauna.
“Like at Shég’ Xdaltth’i’, they hunted mammoth, bison and horse. Those three particular sorts of animals are extinct now. But then they also hunted caribou, which is extant today. Indigenous people in Alaska today hunt caribou. It’s a really important resource for them, and it always has been,” she said.
Beringian archeological occupations are concentrated in an area slightly larger than the U.S. state of Maryland. The professor began making the lengthy trek to the Shég’ Xdaltth’i’ site in 2013, visiting every year until the COVID-19 pandemic. She has since been back in 2021, 2023 and 2025. In addition to being the director of the excavation project, she also secured several National Science Foundation grants totaling $400,000.
More than 80,000 archeological specimens were found during her excavations. These yielded an array of cultural remains, including a unique hafted-biface form, osseous tools, diverse fauna and well-preserved activity areas.
Among her favorite items found was a large stone anvil.
“It was sitting within a dwelling feature, and all around it were really bashed-up bison bones. And there were a lot of quartz and quartzite-rock hammerstones — which were the hammers they used to break the bones. So we think they were using these stones to fully process the bones to extract marrow and likely to render grease. This was all happening near a large earth oven,” Graf said.
Other key finds include bird bones used to fashion needles and numerous diamond-shaped bifacial points, which she said were perhaps the sharpened tips of weapons.
“It’s the only site in Alaska that features this clear diamond shape. And the only other places at this time that have such points in a northern context are on the Russian side of the land bridge. It suggests people traveled across the Bering Land Bridge to and possibly from this location,” she said.
The professor has been at KU since 2022. Her expertise is in Ice Age archaeology, environmental archaeology and the peopling of the Americas.
“I remember taking North American archaeology during undergrad. I fell in love with the Bering Land Bridge concept: People hunting megafauna and traveling from one massive continent to another across exposed continental shelf. Studying extinct animals and the tools hunters used to take these animals. I just got caught up in the ‘wow’ of that,” she said.
Graf noted the importance of studying the evolution of humans and their environment. What started as a mere handful of individuals in a small region expanded to over 8 billion in just a fraction of geological time.
“The past informs us on how humans have adapted and responded to life’s exigencies,” she said. “The more we learn about the evolution of the Homosapiens species, the more we can understand ourselves today.”
Researchers studying how economic inequality became a durable feature of societies often point to factors such as agricultural intensification or the rise of the state, but a new study by Dongdong Li and colleagues suggests inequality can have much deeper roots. In their analysis of previously published mortuary data from more than 2,300 burials across 6,000 years of settlement in the Central Plain of China, Li et al. conclude that inequality was shaped by social-relational networks that long preceded the rise of the state.
The differentiated social positions within these networks could not be explained by agricultural intensification or the size of the population, they found. But the networks did control an individual’s access to labor, resources, and symbolic capital such as ritual objects. The researchers reconstructed these networks in prehistoric China using isotopic, osteological, and zooarchaeological data from sites dated from 7000 to 1500 BCE.
Burial wealth as well as signs of skeletal health and dietary variety were proxies for relational inequalities. Li et al. say that differential access to valued but scarce items initially produced unequal social-relational networks in the region, but that changes in subsistence, the rise of mobile wealth, and escalating violent conflict may have reorganized these networks to concentrate ritual, political, military, and technological control.
Early states then “stabilized rather than created these pre-existing disparities by institutionalizing control over resources, violence, and network-based access,” the authors conclude.
New archaeological discoveries at Shég’ Xdaltth’í’, a 13,800-year-old base camp site in interior Alaska, may provide evidence for a trans-Beringian cultural link with other sites to the west, according to Kelly Graf and colleagues. Their research helps to clarify how and when people traveled across the Bering Land Bridge from Asia to the Americas, as New World archeologists continue to debate the details of this dispersal. Graf et al. provide a first description of the stratigraphy, radiocarbon dating, animal and plant remains, and more than 80,000 artifacts from the oldest layer at Shég’ Xdaltth’í, a name that means “they were there” in Alaska Native Athabascan. The evidence demonstrates how the site became a settled base camp that saw more than two centuries of sustained use. Its tools, including a distinct hafted-biface form, resemble those from Beringian sites further to the west, possibly suggesting a trans-Beringian cultural connection. Other artifacts at Shég’ Xdaltth’í resemble those found at pre-Clovis, Clovis, Folsom, and Late Paleoindian sites further south in temperate North America. In a related Focus, Spencer Pelton discusses why sites like Shég’ Xdaltth’í are bringing back an old idea in New World archaeology: that Beringian explorers who entered the North American continent between 20,000-15,000 years ago were halted until the retreat of the ice sheets allowed them to continue journeying to the south.
For the first time, research reveals the food subsistence strategies of these communities, which involved sophisticated land use practices that incorporated various species
According to a study published in the journal Science Advances, corn cultivation was essential for the subsistence and development of large villages inhabiting the Cerrado – Brazil’s savanna biome – between the 9th and 17th centuries. The research, led by archaeologists from the University of São Paulo and supported by FAPESP, reveals the subsistence strategies of these densely populated communities for the first time. They employed sophisticated land-use practices involving the cultivation of various species (polyculture), with a special emphasis on corn. Previously, scientists considered these communities to be either predominantly mobile hunter-gatherers or monoculture farmers.
In addition to contributing to our understanding of the history of human influence on one of the most biodiverse tropical savannas on the planet, the study sheds light on the food production and land use strategies that shaped the landscapes of the Cerrado as we know them today.
The study also highlights the importance of the biome in understanding the biotechnological innovations used by pre-colonial indigenous Brazilian societies, such as adapting corn to the environmental conditions of the Brazilian savanna, which differ greatly from the plant’s place of origin. Previous research had already addressed the characterization and dispersal of corn in Latin America, showing that it arrived in Brazil via the southwestern Amazon rainforest at least 6,000 years ago. It originated in Mexico, where it first appeared 9,000 years ago, and was subsequently spread to other regions.
The conclusions of the study are based on the analysis of minute chemical variations preserved in human bones and teeth. This analysis made it possible to identify the types of plants and other foods consumed, providing a sort of “record” of diet throughout life.
“I often say that humans are what they eat, and that’s recorded in the chemical composition of their bones and teeth. Through that, we were able to identify corn consumption comparable to that of Mayan or Andean populations – something completely unexpected in this context. We also detected variability between two distinct societies, that is, archaeological traditions with markedly different diets, corroborating social and cultural diversity,” Eliane Chim, a researcher at the University of São Paulo’s Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology (MAE-USP) and the lead author of the article, which is part of her doctoral dissertation, told Agência FAPESP.
“For over a century, Brazilian archaeology has debated the role of corn in pre-colonial societies, especially those with high population densities and more elaborate pottery. This is the first time that its central role in the subsistence of those populations has been demonstrated in Brazil. Just as in the Andes and Mesoamerica, corn cultivation here is associated with societies that had larger populations and left more evident marks on the landscape,” notes André Strauss, project coordinator and Chim’s advisor. Strauss is an archaeologist and a professor at MAE-USP and is one of the corresponding authors of the article, along with Patrick Roberts of the Max Planck Institute in Germany.
The researchers consider the study to be a milestone in Brazilian archaeology because it was published in a high-impact journal with Brazilian authors listed first and last. FAPESP funded the research through a Young Investigators grant awarded to Strauss, fellowships awarded to Chim and other group members (20/04402-0, 23/06749-5, 22/05420-7, and 20/06729-6 ), and two projects, including one that funded publication in the journal (19/15914-4 and 26/12048-8).
The “value” of bones
The scientists analyzed the stable isotopes of carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen in the teeth and bones of more than 100 individuals from 37 archaeological sites in the Cerrado, Caatinga (a semi-arid biome in northeastern Brazil), and the Atlantic Forest. The samples, which date from a period between 1,100 and 400 years ago, were obtained from excavations conducted by the research group and from archaeological collections assembled since the 1970s.
Isotopes are natural variants of each chemical element that differ in the number of neutrons they contain. In the case of carbon, they indicate which types of plants predominated in the diet. For example, they can distinguish corn from other fruits and plants typical of the Cerrado. Nitrogen helps estimate the amount of animal protein consumed and the individuals’ position in the food chain. Oxygen, on the other hand, provides data related to water consumption and environmental conditions.
Since different foods have distinct isotopic signatures, these signatures are “recorded” in body tissues and can be used to reconstruct the diets of ancient populations. This makes it possible to determine whether their diet was primarily based on corn or other foods and whether they consumed animal protein.
Additionally, the scientists performed radiocarbon dating on the collagen of approximately 40% of the bones that still contained protein. This technique determines the age of organic remains. The scientists also used paleoecological records to reconstruct the diets. These records consist of natural remains, such as seeds, sediments, and plant and animal remains, that provide insight into vegetation, climate, and the environment during different periods.
The samples come from the villages of two populations: the Aratu, who lived in the open, and the Una, one of the earliest pottery-making horticulturalists of the Cerrado, who frequented rock shelters, usually near riverbeds or ponds.
Among the Aratu populations, bone collagen and dental enamel from the oldest individuals revealed evidence of corn consumption. Additionally, other studies documented wear marks on ceramic vessels that are consistent with the fermentation of alcoholic beverages. This finding suggests a broader role for cultivated plants in the daily lives of these villages. These findings suggest that corn may have been a dietary staple and possibly used in communal or ritual practices.
“We don’t hear much about them, but these Aratu groups had a unique presence in the Cerrado,” Strauss points out. According to Strauss, Aratu villages had as many as 2,000 inhabitants, a population comparable to that of most European towns of the same era.
In contrast, the rock-shelter populations of the Una culture had a more diverse diet with lower corn intake. Since these groups occupied similar environments to those of the Aratu, the scientists conclude that the differences cannot be explained solely by ecology. Rather, they indicate that distinct cultural traditions and economic strategies coexisted within the biome. Both practiced polyculture, but corn was a primary source of subsistence for the more populous Aratu communities.
Collective effort
The project has been underway for more than ten years. It brought together 31 researchers from 10 Brazilian universities in collaboration with the Max Planck Society and institutions in Portugal, Poland, and the United States.
“Archaeology operates on a different timeline. You can’t accomplish much in six months. You have to go into the field, excavate, return to the lab, and curate the finds. Only then can the analytical phase of the work begin. We also use this as a mechanism for training personnel, and Eliane [Chim] is a prime example of that,” says Strauss.
For Chim, one of the challenges of conducting this type of study is preserving the archaeological material, especially when analyzing collagen. More than 270 artifacts were evaluated to obtain the sample used in the study.
“We intend to resume field research at those archaeological sites and try to locate the farmlands where people cultivated crops. We know the cemeteries, the urn fields, and the size of some villages, but we need to find the other areas occupied by those people,” Chim adds, outlining the future of the research.
