A maritime archaeological excavation in Singapore waters has uncovered the Temasek Wreck—an assemblage that is both locally unprecedented and globally significant for Yuan dynasty ceramics. The excavation, carried out intermittently between 2016 and 2019, recovered approximately 3.5 tonnes of ceramic shards along with a small number of intact or nearly intact pieces.
Most striking is the scale of the Yuan blue-and-white porcelain: the author Dr Michael Flecker, from HeritageSG, a subsidiary of Singapore National Heritage Board, reports that the wreck is "the first ancient shipwreck ever found in Singapore waters", and that its blue-and-white cargo exceeds that of any other documented shipwreck.
The recovered blue-and-white alone weighs about 136 kg, comprising over 2350 shards plus several intact or near-intact objects (about 3.9% of the ceramic cargo by weight).
Beyond blue-and-white from Jingdezhen, China—known for its history of ceramic production that peaked during the Ming and Qing dynasties—the cargo includes a wide variety of Longquan celadon, Jingdezhen qingbai (bluish-white glazed) and shufu (“Privy Council”) wares, Dehua whiteware, greenwares probably from Fujian, and Fujian Cizao storage jars and small-mouth jars.
Dr Flecker notes that—even with relatively few intact pieces—the overall ceramic quality is often "superlative", particularly for Jingdezhen blue-and-white and qingbai/shufu wares, as well as Longquan celadon.
The study also addresses the ship and its route. Although no hull survives, associated evidence supports identification as a Chinese junk. Flecker proposed the vessel likely loaded at Quanzhou of Fujian in the mid-14th century and was bound for the thriving entrepot of Temasek (port that preceded modern Singapore), making this tightly dated assemblage a valuable reference collection for comparing less-provenanced finds.
Ceremonial digging stick or paddle from coastal Peru showing seabirds and possible maize sprouting from abstracted fish and stepped-terrace motifs, The Met Museum 1979.206.1025.
New archaeological evidence reveals that seabird guano – nutrient-rich bird droppings – was not only essential to boosting corn yields and supercharging agriculture in ancient Peru but may have been a driving force behind the rise of the Chincha Kingdom as one of the most prosperous and influential pre‑Inca societies.
Lead author Dr Jacob Bongers, a digital archaeologist at the University of Sydney and a Visiting Research Fellow at the Australian Museum Research Institute, said the findings highlight the unexpectedly powerful role bird droppings played in shaping ancient societies in the Andes.
“Seabird guano may seem trivial, yet our study suggests this potent resource could have significantly contributed to sociopolitical and economic change in the Peruvian Andes,” Dr Bongers said.
“Guano dramatically boosted the production of maize (corn), and this agricultural surplus crucially helped fuel the Chincha Kingdom’s economy, driving their trade, wealth, population growth and regional influence, and shaped their strategic alliance with the Inca Empire.
“In ancient Andean cultures, fertiliser was power.”
Ancient fertiliser, modern science
Published in PLOS One, the study analysed biochemical signatures in 35 maize samples recovered from burial tombs in the Chincha Valley, home to a powerful coastal polity of an estimated 100,000 people.
Chemical analyses revealed exceptionally high nitrogen levels in the maize, far beyond the natural soil conditions typical for the area. This strongly indicates the crops were fertilised with seabird guano, which is enriched in nitrogen due to the birds’ marine diets.
“The guano was most likely harvested from the nearby Chincha Islands, renowned for their abundant and high-quality guano deposits,” Dr Bongers said. “Colonial‑era writings we studied report that communities across coastal Peru and northern Chile sailed to several nearby islands on rafts to collect seabird droppings for fertilisation.”
The researchers also examined regional archaeological imagery featuring seabirds, fish, and sprouting maize depicted together on textiles, ceramics, pottery, wall carvings and paintings, offering a further line of evidence that seabirds and maize held cultural importance in these ancient societies.
“Together, the chemical and material evidence we studied confirms earlier scholarship showing that guano was deliberately collected and used as a fertiliser,” Dr Bongers said. “But it also points to a deeper cultural significance, suggesting people recognised the exceptional power of this fertiliser and actively celebrated, protected and even ritualised the vital relationship between seabirds and agriculture.”
Dr Emily Milton, a postdoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., said the multidisciplinary approach was critical.
“The historical records documenting how bird guano was applied to maize fields helped us interpret the chemical data and understand the regional importance of this practice,” she said. “Our work extends the known geographic extent of guano fertilisation, echoing recent findings in northern Chile, and suggests soil management began at least around 800 years ago in Peru.”
How guano reshaped power on the desert coast
Farming on Peru’s coast is challenging, as it is one of the driest areas on Earth, where even irrigated soils quickly lose nutrients. Guano shipped from offshore islands provided a potent, renewable fertiliser that allowed coastal farmers in the Chincha Valley to grow maize, one of the most important staple crops in the Americas, in abundance.
This agricultural surplus supported specialist merchants, farmers and fisherfolk, and helped the Chincha people to become major coastal traders.
“We know the Chincha were extraordinarily wealthy and one of the most powerful coastal societies of their time. But what underpinned that prosperity? Previous research often pointed to spondylus shells, the spiny oyster, as the key driver of merchant wealth,” Dr Bongers said.
“Our evidence suggests guano was central to the Chincha Kingdom’s success, with the Chincha’s maritime knowledge and access to the Chincha Islands likely reframing their strategic importance in the region.”
The Inca, based in the highlands of the Andes, produced the largest native empire in the Americas before Europeans arrived and were famously obsessed with maize, using it to make ceremonial fermented beer, or ‘chicha’. But they couldn’t grow much of it in their highland environments, nor could they sail.
“Guano was a highly sought-after resource the Incas would have wanted access to, playing an important role in the diplomatic arrangements between the Inca and the Chincha communities,” Dr Bongers said.
“It expanded Chincha’s agricultural productivity and mercantile influence, leading to exchanges of resources and power.”
Coauthor Dr Jo Osborn at Texas A&M University said this research invites us to reconsider what 'wealth' meant in the ancient Andes.
“The true power of the Chincha wasn't just access to a resource; it was their mastery of a complex ecological system,” she said. “They possessed the traditional knowledge to see the connection between marine and terrestrial life, and they turned that knowledge into the agricultural surplus that built their kingdom. Their art celebrates this connection, showing us that their power was rooted in ecological wisdom, not just gold or silver.”
The findings expand on Dr Bongers’ recent research on the Band of Holes just south of the Chincha Valley, where he suggests that the site was an ancient marketplace built by the Chincha Kingdom.
“This research adds another layer to our understanding of how the Chincha, and potentially other coastal communities, used resources, trade and agriculture to expand their influence in the pre-Hispanic era,” Dr Bongers said.
Medieval Christians in Denmark showed off their wealth in death by buying prestigious graves: the closer to the church, the higher the price. Researchers used these gravesites to investigate social exclusion based on illness, by studying whether people with leprosy — a highly stigmatized disease culturally associated with sin — or tuberculosis were kept out of the higher-status areas. Unexpectedly, they found that people who were ill with stigmatized diseases were buried just as prominently as their peers.
“When we started this work, I was immediately reminded of the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail, specifically the scene with the plague cart,” said Dr Saige Kelmelis of the University of South Dakota, lead author of the article in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology. “I think this image depicts our ideas of how people in the past — and in some cases today — respond to debilitating diseases. However, our study reveals that medieval communities were variable in their responses and in their makeup. For several communities, those who were sick were buried alongside their neighbors and given the same treatment as anyone else.”
Beyond the graves
The lead researchers, Kelmelis and Vicki Kristensen and Dr Dorthe Pedersen of the University of Southern Denmark, examined 939 adult skeletons from five Danish medieval cemeteries: three urban and two rural, to capture possible differences between towns and the countryside. Higher population density makes it easier for both leprosy and tuberculosis to be transmitted, and unhealthy conditions traditionally associated with medieval towns increase vulnerability to both diseases.
However, the two diseases impacted patients’ lives differently. Leprosy patients’ facial lesions would have marked them out as different, unlike the less-specific symptoms of tuberculosis.
“Tuberculosis is one of those chronic infections that people can live with for a very long time without symptoms,” said Kelmelis. “Also, tuberculosis is not as visibly disabling as leprosy, and in a time when the cause of infection and route of transmission were unknown, tuberculosis patients were likely not met with the same stigmatization as the more obvious leprosy patients. Perhaps medieval folks were so busy dealing with one disease that the other was just the cherry on top of the disease sundae.”
The scientists assessed disease status for each skeleton, as well as how long each person had lived. Leprosy leaves behind evidence of facial lesions and damage to the hands and feet caused by secondary infections, while tuberculosis affects the joints and bones near the lungs.
Scientists then mapped out the cemeteries, looking for any demarcations that would indicate status differences, like burials within religious buildings. They plotted each skeleton on these maps, looking for differences between higher- and lower-status areas.
“There is documentation of individuals being able to pay a fee to have a more privileged place of burial,” explained Kelmelis. “In life, these folks — benefactors, knights, and clergy — were also likely able to use their wealth to secure closer proximity to divinity, such as having a pew closer to the front of the church.”
Bring out your dead
The scientists found no overall link between disease and burial status. Only at the urban cemetery of Ribe were there any differences that correlated with health: roughly a third of people buried in the lower-status cemetery had tuberculosis, compared to 12% of the people buried in the monastery or the church. As people with leprosy or tuberculosis were not excluded from higher-status areas, the researchers think this reflected different levels of exposure to tuberculosis, not stigma.
However, all cemeteries contained many tuberculosis patients — especially the urban cemetery of Drotten, where nearly half the burials were in high-status areas and 51% had tuberculosis. People who could afford prestigious graves could also have paid for better living conditions, which helped them survive tuberculosis long enough for the disease to mark their bones.
These results suggest that medieval people were less likely to exclude the visibly sick from society than stereotypes indicate. However, the researchers caution that more excavations are needed to get a more complete picture of some cemeteries, and that their stringent diagnostic criteria may not have identified every patient.
“Individuals may have been carrying the bacteria but died before it could show up in the skeleton,” cautioned Kelmelis. “Unless we can include genomic methods, we may not know the full extent of how these diseases affected past communities.”
As drought and rising organizational demands for larger hunting operations hit at the same time, ancient hunters adapted to severe droughts by shifting the way and where they hunted, study shows
On the Great Plains of North America, bison were hunted for thousands of years before populations collapsed to near extinction due to overexploitation in the late 1800s. But long before then, bison hunters used various strategies and different types of sites, sometimes switching between sites.
Now, researchers sought to understand why hunting stopped when bison continued to be present at the Bergstrom site in central Montana, where bison were hunted intermittently for around 700 years before the site fell into disuse. The results were published in Frontiers in Conservation Science.
“We found that bison hunters ceased using a kill site in central Montana around 1,100 years ago,” said first author Dr John Wendt, a paleoecologist and assistant professor of rangeland ecosystem management at New Mexico State University. “It appears that hunters stopped using it because severe, recurring droughts reduced the water available for processing animals at a small nearby creek. Site abandonment was a response to environmental stressors and changing social and economic pressures.”
More than bison
To understand what shaped choice of hunting sites and organization, the team combined archaeological excavation, sediment coring, and laboratory analyses. “The Bergstrom site presented a puzzle because it was used intermittently and abandoned when bison were common throughout the region and hunting was intense,” Wendt explained. “Why would hunters stop using a site that had worked for so long?”
To get to the mystery’s core, the researchers dug nine 1×1m excavation pits in the spring of 2019. Excavated materials were documented and photographed and charcoal fragments were sent off for radiocarbon analysis. Two sediment cores were collected directly next to the excavation area. The team analyzed these for pollen and charcoal fragments. They also tracked the presence of large herbivores and analyzed climate reconstructions. Based on this, the team was able to see if ecological changes explained why Bergstrom was abandoned, or if something else had driven hunters away.
“Abandonment wasn’t because the site became ecologically unsuitable in any absolute sense. Bison were still around, vegetation hadn’t changed, and there was no substantive shift in fire activities,” Wendt pointed out. “Bison hunting activity was not simply following prey populations.”
Levelling up hunting sites
Instead, severe droughts stretching decades hit the region before and after final abandonment of the site. Such droughts limited how much water was available, but also made locations where water wasn’t a given less attractive to hunter groups. At the same time, many hunters reorganized themselves from small mobile groups working opportunistically to more coordinated, larger groups who used constructed infrastructure and occupied sites for longer time periods.
“These larger operations were based on large kills and could produce surplus for trade and winter storage, but they also meant more dependence on specific resources like water, forage for larger herds, and fuel for processing fires,” said Wendt.
Sites meeting these characteristics were more scarce, as they also needed topographic features suited to large bison drives, such as cliffs for jumps and features to contain herds. If these characteristics were given, however, such sites often saw repeated, large-scale use over centuries.
Sophisticated climate adaptation
Favoring larger sites, however, meant greater dependency on everything going right, as these sites were harder to replace. Hunters worked at these sites over generations and could reorganize as conditions changed. Maintaining cultural knowledge and flexibility is most likely what allowed this type of hunting organization to persist through climate variability, the team said. This flexibility is also relevant to modern bison management systems, which can increase their odds of persisting through climate variability by retaining the capacity to reorganize how and where animals are managed.
The team pointed out that their conclusions may not hold true for other bison hunting sites in the region, which may have been abandoned for other reasons. In addition, while the study shows use for around 700 years, it could not determine how long each use period lasted or how frequently the site was used during this time. It also is possible that after abandonment, the Bergstrom site saw infrequent, low-impact use that left minimal traces that could not be detected, the team said.
“While people have been adapting to the climate for much longer, Bergstrom’s abandonment shows that people reorganized in response to recurring droughts in the last 2,000 years,” concluded Wendt.
Researchers led by the University of Vienna and Liège University Hospital Centre have identified genetic variants associated with a rare inherited growth disorder in two prehistoric individuals who lived more than 12,000 years ago. Using ancient DNA analysis and modern clinical genetics, they diagnosed the condition in a mother and daughter buried together in southern Italy. Published in theNew England Journal of Medicine, the study shows that paleogenomics can now reconstruct ancient population history and diagnose rare genetic diseases in prehistoric individuals.
The discovery builds on a reanalysis of a well-known Upper Paleolithic burial discovered in 1963 at Grotta del Romito in southern Italy, which has long puzzled researchers. Unusual skeletal features and the circumstances of the burial raised longstanding questions about the relationship between the individuals and the medical reasons for their short stature.
A remarkable double burial raises questions
The two were interred together in an embrace. "Romito 2", an adolescent with pronounced limb shortening, previously assumed to be male, lay in the arms of "Romito 1", thought to be an adult female. No signs of trauma were observed. Romito 2 had an estimated height of about 110 cm, consistent with a rare skeletal growth disorder known as acromesomelic dysplasia, though this could not be confirmed solely from bones. Romito 1 was also shorter – about 145 cm –than average for the period. For decades, researchers debated their gender, relationship, and the possibility of a common cause of their short stature.
About the study
The team analysed ancient DNA extracted from the petrous part of the temporal bone of both individuals, a region known for preserving genetic material well. Genetic analysis established a first-degree relationship. The researchers then screened genes associated with skeletal growth and compared the identified variants with modern clinical data. This interdisciplinary approach, combining paleogenomics, clinical genetics, and physical anthropology, involved an international team from the University of Vienna and collaborators in Italy, Portugal, and Belgium.
Earliest genetic diagnosis in humans
The analysis showed that both individuals were female and first-degree relatives, most likely a mother and daughter. In Romito 2, researchers identified a homozygous variant in the NPR2 gene, which is essential for bone growth. This confirmed a diagnosis of acromesomelic dysplasia, Maroteaux type — a very rare inherited disorder characterized by severe short stature and marked shortening of the limbs. Genetic data from Romito 1 indicate that she carried one altered copy of the same gene, a condition associated with milder short stature.
Rare diseases in human history
Ron Pinhasi, University of Vienna, who co-led the study says: "By applying ancient DNA analysis, we can now identify specific mutations in prehistoric individuals. This helps establish how far back rare genetic conditions existed and may also uncover previously unknown variants." Daniel Fernandes of the University of Coimbra, first author of the study, adds: "Identifying both individuals as female and closely related turns this burial into a familial genetic case. The older woman's milder short stature likely reflects a heterozygous mutation, showing how the same gene affected members of a prehistoric family differently." Clinically, the results highlight the deep history of rare diseases. Adrian Daly of Liège University Hospital Centre, a co-leader of the study, notes: "Rare genetic diseases are not a modern phenomenon but have been present throughout human history. Understanding their history may help recognising such conditions today."
Evidence of social care
Despite severe physical limitations, Romito 2 survived into adolescence or adulthood, suggesting sustained care within her community. Alfredo Coppa of Sapienza University of Rome, who also co-led the study, says: "We believe her survival would have required sustained support from her group, including help with food and mobility in a challenging environment."
Summary
Ancient DNA analysis revealed that two individuals buried together in southern Italy were closely related — most likely mother and daughter.
In the younger individual, two altered copies of the NPR2 gene confirmed acromesomelic dysplasia (Maroteaux type), a condition marked by severe short stature and pronounced limb shortening; the older individual carried one altered copy linked to milder short stature.
The findings show that rare genetic diseases were already present in prehistoric populations and can now be studied using paleogenomics.
The younger individual's survival despite severe physical limitations suggests sustained care and social support within her community.
Credit: Image by the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, CAS.
An international research team has uncovered evidence of advanced stone tool technologies in East Asia dating back 160,000 to 72,000 years, with the findings recently published in Nature Communications.
Led by the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the team—which included researchers from China, Australia, Spain, and the United States—conducted multidisciplinary archaeological investigations at the Xigou site in the Danjiangkou Reservoir region of central China. Their work yielded evidence of sophisticated stone tool technologies dating from 160,000 to 72,000 years ago, revealing that hominins in the region were far more innovative and adaptable than previously thought. This period coincided with the coexistence of multiple large-brained hominin species in China, including Homo longi, Homo juluensis, and potentially Homo sapiens.
To establish the site's age, the researchers applied multiple luminescence dating methods to six samples for cross-validation. Results indicated that quartz recuperated optically stimulated luminescence (ReOSL) ages provide a reliable benchmark for the depositional age of the site's stratigraphic profile. Consequently, the cultural layer at Xigou has been dated to roughly 160,000–72,000 years ago, creating a well-defined chronological framework for studying hominin activity during this interval.
Detailed analysis of 2,601 lithic artifacts recovered from the site shows that ancient inhabitants employed refined stone tool-making techniques to produce small flakes and formal tools. Small-sized flakes were generated using core reduction strategies ranging from expedient to highly systematic—including core-on-flake and discoid technologies. The standardized retouching patterns of the dominant small tools are indicative of a high degree of technological complexity and uniformity.
Among the most notable discoveries is the earliest known evidence of hafted stone tools in East Asia—representing the region's earliest confirmed composite tools. Traceological analysis identified two distinct handle types: juxtaposed and male. These composite tools, which integrated stone components with handles or shafts, reflect advanced planning, skilled craftsmanship, and a sophisticated understanding of how to optimize tool performance.
The archaeological discoveries at Xigou challenge the long-held narrative that early hominins in China exhibited technological conservatism over time. The site's robust stratigraphic sequence, spanning nearly 90,000 years, aligns with mounting evidence of increasing hominin diversity across China during this period. The presence of large-brained hominins at sites such as Xujiayao and Lingjing—some classified as Homo juluensis—provides a plausible biological basis for the behavioral complexity evident in Xigou's stone tool assemblages.
