Diet reveals what life was like 2,700 years ago in a local community: Gender inequality,...

 

 social status, and migration

Biological and archaeological analysis of human remains from a 2,700-year-old Italian necropolis reveals, through what the people ate, how they lived, how they moved, and how they organized their society

An international study led by the Universities of Córdoba and Pisa used isotopic analysis to reconstruct the dietary traces left in the human remains found in an Italian necropolis, revealing what daily life was like in that community 2,700 years ago. Despite the passage of time, certain patterns of behavior recur: diet, human mobility, gender differences, and the role of funerary symbolism to signify social status.

The study focused on the Novilara necropolis, one of the largest burial grounds of the Picene culture (a pre-Roman culture in central Italy that was contemporaneous with the Tartessian societies on the Iberian Peninsula, among others), and combined bioarchaeological and multi-isotopic analyses.

Specifically, the research team analyzed the stable isotopes of carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur, "chemical footprints" of diets, recorded in bones, teeth, hair, and nails that can be preserved for thousands of years. "As they form, bones and teeth absorb the isotopic composition of the food and water consumed. As a result, analyzing them can provide information about diet, mobility, and the environment in which people lived," explained Zita Laffranchi, a researcher in the Prehistory Department at the University of Córdoba.

While isotopes provide information about diet, food offers clues about social behavior. In this regard, the study revealed a diet that differed by sex (men had greater access to animal protein compared to women), and a society in which between 1.4% and 6.4% of the people came from other areas, suggesting mobility and contact with other populations, including some that were even distant.

Their diet, primarily based on cereals and meat rather than fish — despite the proximity of the Adriatic Sea, just 6 kilometers away — suggests that the prestige reflected in some tombs wasn't always accompanied by noticeable differences in the living conditions of those who were buried.

"The study shows that social inequality cannot be interpreted solely based on the objects placed in graves," Laffranchi explained. Individuals buried with valuable objects, such as amber ornaments or weapons, showed no isotopic evidence of eating better than those buried more modestly. This suggests that the social status conveyed by the grave was a symbolic construct that did not necessarily reflect the deceased's position or living conditions. Instead, it likely stemmed, at least in part, from the decisions and traditions of the community's survivors.

The study, published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, provides new evidence about the lifestyles of pre-Roman Iron Age societies and helps us understand the extent to which social differences, gender, and mobility were reflected in daily life. "The study demonstrates the potential of bioarchaeological approaches to understand how people experienced identity, mobility, and social differences in the past," said Marco Milella, a researcher at the University of Pisa.

Reference

Laffranchi, Z., Beck De Lotto, M.A., Delpino, C., Lösch, S., Milella, M. (2026). Multi-isotopic insights into diet, mobility, and status in the Picene necropolis of Novilara, Italy (8th–7th centuries BCE). Journal of Archaeological Science 192, 106633. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2026.106633

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Journal

Journal of Archaeological Science

DOI

10.1016/j.jas.2026.106633 

Many ancient societies buried their dead at home. Why did the practice start...

 

and why has it largely disappeared?

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image: 

The slab-stone roof of a subterranean tomb on residential Terrace 925 at El Palmillo, Santiago Matatlán, Oaxaca, Mexico (ca. 700–850 CE). The image foreground is the surface of a domestic patio with small remnants of white plaster, while the tomb was situated under a room of the house (positioned on the terrace). Note the small carved stone, which was part of the patio banquette in front of the tomb. When in use, the tomb was entered from the patio.

 

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Credit: Photo credit: Linda M. Nicholas, Field Museum.

There are countless different cultures and societies around the world, spanning thousands of years. One thing that they all have in common is that no matter what, death is a part of everybody’s life. Examining how different societies commemorate their dead can give archaeologists and anthropologists insights into how those societies work and what matters to them. In a new paper published in the journal American Antiquity, a team of researchers explored the practice of burying the dead in or near their family’s houses.

“In the deep past, settlements were places where both the living and the dead coexisted and felt at home,” says Sabina Cveček, an archaeologist and Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Postdoctoral Fellow at the Field Museum in Chicago.

Residential burials, in which people are buried inside of or very close to their houses, are no longer common, especially in the West. But over the past few centuries, cultural anthropologists have documented several societies all around the world that have residential burials. Why some societies began burying their dead at home, and why so many of them later stopped, has remained a mystery. “Until now, nobody had tried to find a way to predict whether or not a society would practice residential burial,” says Cveček, the new paper’s lead author.

“One theory about why some societies started to practice residential burials has to do with where people lived, and how long they lived there,” says Cveček. “Some researchers theorized that once people started settling down, they might have buried their dead by their houses to mark their territory.”

To investigate this theory, Cveček examined a database of cultural records, or ethnographies, dating back several centuries. She built a dataset of 60 different societies from around the world and found that 12% of the ones in her sample practiced residential burials. That number seemed low to Cveček and her colleagues.

“I went over the data with Carol Ember, an anthropologist at Human Relations Area Files at Yale, and we agreed, we weren’t seeing that many residential burials in these records. We wanted to know, what’s going on?” says Cveček. Cveček, Ember, and their colleague Tim Earle, an archaeologist at Northwestern University, reached out to fellow archaeologists at the Field Museum, who were familiar with the seemingly more frequent occurrence of residential burials in ancient sites.

The researchers consulted another database and built another dataset based on archaeological records. Unlike the ethnographies, which were written by anthropologists about societies that they observed in real life in the past few centuries, the archaeological data included information about societies from thousands of years ago. “Ethnographies are about as old as the practice of cultural anthropology, so they only date back a couple hundred years, but archaeology can tell us about societies from way longer ago,” says Cveček.

The research team examined burial records from 49 different archaeological sites from around the world. They found a lot more evidence of residential burials than they had in the ethnographies of more recent societies. “It was incredible to see, about 33% of the communities we looked at had at least some family members buried within or around their homes,” says Cveček.

The team wanted to know why residential burials were so much more common in the earlier societies than in the more recent ones. While some anthropologists and archaeologists have hypothesized that residential burials were associated with people living in more permanent residences, the data didn’t support this idea.

“We found that there wasn’t a strong link between how transient or permanent a society was, and how likely they would be to practice residential burial,” says Cveček. But the databases did yield a potential reason why the more recent ethnographies contained so few descriptions of residential burials in comparison to the older archaeological findings.

“In the ethnographies I read, in many cases, anthropologists would say that the society being described used to practice residential burials, but that they stopped when major organized religions and colonization arrived in those places. For instance, they’d say that a society used to bury their dead at home, but now they use Christian cemeteries outside the settlement, or that a society used to bury their dead at home, but with the spread of Hinduism, they adopted cremation,” says Cveček. “It seems like colonization really impacted burial practices on a global scale for the past four centuries and beyond, and that’s part of why residential burials are much less common in the ethnographic record.”

Gary Feinman, a co-author of the study and the MacArthur Curator of Mesoamerican and Central American Anthropology at the Field Museum’s Negaunee Integrative Research Center, notes that colonization doesn’t explain all of the changes in burial practices that the team observed, but that change over time is common in cultural practices overall. “A key finding of this paper is that even a practice as sensitive and important to most people as how and where we inter our dead can shift in specific cultural contexts over time. Human cultural behaviors are dynamic, not static, and for some of the cases studied here, the changes in burial practices even shifted well before the Colonial era,” says Feinman.

Overall, the findings offer anthropologists a deeper understanding of humanity. “The choices people make about burying their loved ones provide insights for archaeologists into how their societies were organized,” says William A. Parkinson, Curator & Associate Director of Anthropology at the Field Museum and the paper’s senior author.

While questions remain about what makes a society more likely to practice residential burials, Cveček says that the underlying story of the practice can help us forge connections to our fellow humans around the world.  “I think the most beautiful message from this study is that there are so many different practices of mourning the dead. But residential burial, keeping the dead close to you at home, was a practice present around the globe throughout human history,” says Cveček.

This study was contributed to by Sabina Cveček (Field Museum), Timothy Earle (Northwestern University), Carol Ember (Yale University), Gary Feinman (Field Museum), and William A. Parkinson (Field Museum).

 

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Journal

American Antiquity

DOI

10.1017/aaq.2026.10208 

Fossil footprints reveal body size and group dynamics of 1.4-million-year-old human relative

 

New study provides a rare snapshot of “fossil behavior” from Paranthropus boisei, an ancient hominin group in northern Kenya

Peer-Reviewed Publication

Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

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image: 

One of the large, 1.4-million-year-old footprints that the team excavated. A 6-inch (~15 cm) ruler is shown for scale.  

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Credit: © Kay Behrensmeyer

To the point

• A snapshot of ancient behavior: Fossil footprints from northern Kenya preserve evidence of eight Paranthropus boisei individuals moving together along a lakeshore around 1.4 million years ago.
• Unexpectedly large body size: The footprints indicate human-like body sizes — up to 1.8 meters tall and around 75 kilograms — larger than previous estimates based on rare fossil bones.
• Insights into group dynamics: The tracks suggest that mostly adult male individuals traveled together, hinting at a complex social structure in this extinct human relative.
• Lake margins as key habitats: Hundreds of hominin footprints from the East Turkana region show that ancient human relatives repeatedly used lakeshore environments over more than 100,000 years.

A new study documents a set of fossil footprints preserving a snapshot of “fossil behavior” from an ancient hominin group along a lakeshore in northern Kenya around 1.4 million years ago.

An international team of researchers from the US and Kenya found tracks showing eight Paranthropus boisei individuals — an extinct “cousin” of modern humans — in one place at one time. All of the individuals are thought to be adults, and some appear to have been much larger in body size than previous estimates based on rare fossil bones.

Large footprints, large bodies

Analytical methods that this research team pioneered in 2024 helped distinguish these new tracks as belonging to Paranthropus boisei, based on their apparent foot anatomy and movement patterns. However, their sizes were surprising. “The sizes of the footprints indicate human-like body sizes – up to 1.8 meters tall and around 75 kilograms”, says lead author Kevin Hatala, of Chatham University and an associated researcher of the Department of Human Origins at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig.

Until recently, the overwhelming majority of Paranthropus boisei fossils were skulls with massive jaws and teeth, and little has been known about their anatomy from the neck down. But these latest findings challenge earlier studies that suggested Paranthropus boisei was considerably smaller than the contemporary Homo erectus, which is a possible direct ancestor of modern humans.

Fossil footprint surfaces are known to form very quickly and therefore can also be a useful window into hominin behavior and group dynamics. “The fact that eight, mostly adult male, Paranthropus boisei individuals seemingly traveled together as a group, without females or children, hints at a complex social structure in this species”, says co-author Neil Roach of Harvard University. “They may have lived in large groups, where males competed for mates, but also tolerated each other at times for safety in a dangerous environment.”

This discovery adds an important behavioral dimension to the fossil record of Paranthropus boisei, a species that lived alongside early members of the genus Homo, yet took a different evolutionary path.

Returning to the lake shore

A growing assemblage of ancient human footprints in lake margin environments also points toward this being an important habitat with critical resources for our extinct relatives. “To me, it is amazing that we have the same kind of lake margin deposits in two areas of East Turkana that are 40 kilometers apart, at about the same age”, says co-author Kay Behrensmeyer of the Smithsonian Institution.

At this point, the research team has documented hundreds of hominin footprints across more than a half-dozen sites in this region. Behrensmeyer predicts that, “if we can understand what geological conditions allowed these tracks to be preserved, we should know more about why hominins continued to return to the lake shore environment over more than 100,000 years.”

Building a photo album of the past

The team will be back in Kenya this year to continue research into these special fossil footprint sites. “Each site represents a snapshot of our past, and we are quickly building a photo album with several different windows to hominin anatomy, locomotion, behavior, and environments during the Early Pleistocene,” says Hatala.

Co-author Purity Kiura of the National Museums of Kenya adds, “The discovery of these fossil footprints along the margins of Lake Turkana reinforces the region's global importance in understanding human evolution, preserving remarkable evidence of how our ancient relatives lived 1.4 million years ago. It further strengthens Kenya's position as one of the world's leading paleoanthropological landscapes and highlights our responsibility to protect this irreplaceable heritage.”

Combining new analytical approaches with exceptional fossil footprint sites, the study demonstrates that ancient tracks can reveal the anatomy and movement of extinct human relatives, while also providing rare insights into their social lives and environments.

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Journal

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

DOI

10.1073/pnas.2530996123 

Unravelling the climate behind the collapse of Bronze Age civilizations

 

Peer-Reviewed Publication

Stockholm University

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image: 

The Eastern Mediterranean dried as part of a broader climate transition; weakening monsoons and shifting atmospheric circulation reduced moisture from Africa and rainfall across the region. Image: Katherine Power/Stockholm University

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Credit: Katherine Power/Stockholm University

The most severe droughts in the ancient Eastern Mediterranean arose when multiple natural climate cycles coincided, according to a new study from Stockholm University published in Science Advances. The findings shed new light on the climate conditions surrounding the Late Bronze Age collapse and may help improve understanding of future drought risks in a warming world.

“Rather than being caused by a single climatic event, we found that the most extreme droughts emerged when natural climate cycles operating over different timescales coincided. This helps explain why the drought associated with the Late Bronze Age collapse were so severe”, says Katherine Power, PhD student, Department of Physical Geography, Stockholm University, and first author of the study.

Around 3,200 years ago, many of the great civilizations of the Eastern Mediterranean, including the Mycenaeans, Minoans and Hittite Empire, experienced widespread societal collapse. Although severe droughts have long been linked to this period, the climatic processes behind these events remain uncertain. To investigate this, Katherine Power and Qiong Zhang, professor in paleoclimate modelling, Department of Physical Geography, Stockholm University and co-author of the study, used a state-of-the-art climate model to reconstruct the evolution of the Mediterranean climate over the past 8,000 years.

“Our results show that the region underwent a gradual drying trend over thousands of years, driven by slow changes in Earth’s orbit. Superimposed on this long-term trend we also found shorter-term fluctuations in the Atlantic Ocean and atmosphere”, says Katherine Power.

The researchers found that most severe droughts occurred when several natural climate cycles aligned, temporarily reinforcing one another and producing droughts far more intense than the long-term drying trend alone.

“The convergence of these processes pushed the Eastern Mediterranean beyond a critical hydroclimatic threshold, reducing water availability and increasing pressure on agriculture and food security within already vulnerable societies”, Katherine Power says.

These findings change how we think about past droughts, the researcher say, and understanding these processes is highly relevant today:

“The Mediterranean is one of the world’s climate change hotspots and the area is projected to become warmer and drier during the coming century. Our findings suggest that future drought risk may depend not only on long-term human-driven warming, but also on how natural variability in the Atlantic Ocean interacts with that background trend”, Katherine Power explains.

By revealing how different climate processes combine to amplify drought, this research can provide new insights into the risks of future hydroclimatic extremes in a warming world, the researchers say. 

The study “Holocene ocean-atmosphere coupling and Mediterranean sensitivity to Atlantic circulation: Lessons from the Late Bronze Age collapse” was published in Science Advances. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aed5439.
For this research the model EC-Earth was used.
 

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Journal

Science Advances

DOI

10.1126/sciadv.aed5439 

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Holocene ocean-atmosphere coupling and Mediterranean sensitivity to Atlantic circulation: Lessons from the Late Bronze Age collapse

Ceramic vessels reveal how social inequalities were also cooked into 19th-century Brazil

 

Peer-Reviewed Publication

Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona

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image: 

The study analysed the lipids preserved in more than 180 ceramic fragments and the proteins present in a selection of these pieces.

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Credit: ICTA-UAB

Fish, shellfish, maize, manioc, rice and even chicken eggs. Molecular residues preserved in more than 180 ceramic vessels from southern Brazil have made it possible to reconstruct what different communities were cooking more than a century ago, showing that access to food varied according to the origin and social status of their inhabitants.

An international study led by researchers from the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (ICTA-UAB) reveals that Indigenous, African and Afro-descendant communities relied more heavily on marine resources, while communities of immigrants from Germany consumed mainly plant species and terrestrial products.

Brazil is a multicultural and ethnically diverse country whose history has been shaped by the interaction between Indigenous peoples, African populations, Luso-Brazilian communities and, later, European immigrant communities. However, little is known about how this cultural diversity was reflected in people's everyday diet. The research has reconstructed part of this history by analysing food residues preserved in ceramics used between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Babitonga Bay, southern Brazil.

The study, recently published in Royal Society Open Science, analysed the lipids preserved in more than 180 ceramic fragments and the proteins present in a selection of these pieces. Thanks to molecular archaeology techniques, the researchers were able to identify the types of food that were cooked or stored in the vessels used by Indigenous, Luso-Brazilian, Afro-descendant communities, and the first German immigrants established in the region.

The results show clear differences between the communities. Hand-modelled vessels, associated with Indigenous, Afro-descendant and Luso-Brazilian communities, show a greater presence of marine resources, such as fish and shellfish, as well as maize. In contrast, wheel-thrown ceramics, used mainly by German immigrants, show a greater presence of crops and terrestrial products, including meat and, in some cases, dairy products.

The molecular analysis made it possible to go one step further and identify specific foods cooked more than a century ago. These include fish from the Sciaenidae family, chicken egg and biomarkers compatible with the processing of maize, rice, manioc, beans, fruits and vegetables, and animal fats. According to the researchers, this combination of lipid and protein analyses provides a more accurate picture of the everyday diet of the different communities that lived around Babitonga Bay.

"The residues preserved in these ceramics show that everyday diet reflected the profound social and cultural differences that characterised Brazil at the end of the nineteenth century. Molecular archaeology allows us to recover part of this history that is unlikely to appear in written documents," explains André Colonese, ICTA-UAB researcher and co-author of the study, which was carried out as part of the ERC Tradition project.

According to the researchers, the differences observed are not explained solely by culinary preferences, but also by unequal access to food. While livestock and certain crops were more closely linked to private property and an expanding market economy, fishing and the exploitation of coastal resources provided a more accessible source of food for communities with fewer resources. The results suggest that these foods played a fundamental role in ensuring the subsistence of many households in a context marked by significant social inequalities.

In addition to reconstructing the diet of these populations, the study demonstrates the potential of biomolecular archaeology to understand how economic, social and cultural changes transformed everyday diet. The authors believe that many of the differences dating back more than a century help explain the culinary diversity that characterises Brazil today.

 

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Journal

Royal Society Open Science

DOI

10.1098/rsos.260385