What sheep's teeth can tell us about life in a medieval Kazakhstan town

 

University of Michigan

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Sheep mandibles were analyzed for isotopes in an international study including University of Michigan researchers. The study examined flexible herding techniques in a city in Kazakhstan during the 9th and 10th centuries.

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Credit: Alicia Ventresca-Miller, University of Michigan

ANN ARBOR—You might not often think about the molars of livestock, but everything from the grass they eat to the water they drink can tell a story about how people lived centuries ago.

An international collaboration led by University of Michigan researchers examined herd management in medieval Kazakhstan using isotopes embedded in the enamel of sheep's molars. They found that people living in the arid region fine-tuned their strategies of animal management in order to succeed in a challenging environment.

The study specifically found that people in the medieval town of Dzhankent fed their flocks dried grass, acquired animals from outside their region for food, and carefully planned when sheep would give birth, which suggests they were trying to ensure milk and milk products like cheese would be available year-round, the researchers say.

"Dzhankent was particularly resilient in that they were flexible in their herd management strategies to keep the population fed year-round," said Kara Larson, doctoral candidate in the U-M Museum of Anthropological Archaeology and lead author of the study published in the journal Archaeometry. "So often we see narratives of urban populations being solely reliant on one method of herd management, so it is exciting to see how adaptive Dzhankent was, both in local herding and in pulling in regionally sourced animals."

From the 7th to 11th centuries CE, Dzhankent, located in southern Kazakhstan, evolved from a fishing and agricultural village to a larger town, serving as a key node on the northern Silk Roads, a network of Asian trade routes. But little is known about how the city sustained itself.

"The Silk Road city of Dzhankent was vital to trade during the 9th and 10th centuries. In order to feed its inhabitants, there was a great diversity in herding strategies and the season of birth of sheep," said Alicia Ventresca-Miller, associate curator of archaeological sciences at the UMMAA. "This indicates inhabitants were trying to extend access to milk products across the year, and were further mitigating risks by having varied pasturing and foddering practices. That is, they were intentionally moving sheep and giving them extra cut grass during lean times."

Flexibility in a challenging environment

Situated within the Aral Sea basin, Dzhankent is surrounded by semi-desert and desert, and dependent on water from the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers. During the winter, air from Siberia keeps temperatures at around 14 degrees below zero. Summers are hot and dry, and temperatures hover around 80 degrees. Between 4 and 5.5 inches of rain fall each year.

As sheep eat and drink, isotopes in their food and water become part of their teeth. Determining the composition of isotopes in the sheep's teeth can tell researchers how sheep were pastured, when they gave birth and were culled, and how they were foddered, or fed. To study the herd management practices of people living at Dzhankent, the researchers analyzed the second molars of 16 sheep, sequentially measuring carbon and oxygen isotopes within the enamel. 

The researchers then broke the 16 sheep down into six groups based on the combined  carbon and oxygen values. There is seasonal variation in oxygen isotope ratios, which are elevated during the summer months and lower during the winter months. 

Comparatively, higher carbon isotope ratios indicate consumption of grass during the summer or dry seasons, while lower carbon isotope ratios indicate consumption of plants in the winter or wetter seasons. 

Researchers found that sheep likely were bred throughout the year, with the majority of individuals born in the spring months. Breeding sheep throughout the year was likely a strategy to keep them producing milk during the winter months.

"People living at Dzhankent could depend on milk and milk products such as dried, salted cheese curds that served as a source of sustenance during lean times. This is similar to the modern era when people eat qurt, a Kazakh cheese, year round," Ventresca-Miller said. "Based on the diversity of herding practices and extension of sheep birthing periods, we know that this town was resilient."

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Journal

Archaeometry

DOI

10.1111/arcm.70199 

Mesolithic hunter-gatherers on Malta

 

Peer-Reviewed Publication

PNAS Nexus

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Cave site of Latnija in the northern Mellieħa region of Malta, which revealed evidence of over 1000 years of forager occupations.

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Credit: Huw Groucutt

The existence of humans on Malta, a tiny Mediterranean island, in the Mesolithic period is puzzling. Archaeological evidence indicates foragers occupied the Maltese islands between 8,500 and 7,500 years ago, and it is hypothesized that they arrived by a sea crossing. How did they survive over such an extended timeframe, given the limited resources available on this small island? James Blinkhorn and colleagues model the demographic and subsistence potential of Malta and Sicily during the terminal Pleistocene to Holocene. The authors considered sea levels and fluctuations in the productivity of the vegetation to generate estimates of forager densities from comparisons to recent ethnographic datasets. Malta and Sicily became separate islands by about 14,200 years ago, and both shrank in area over time, with Malta eventually reaching its current size of 252 km2. The minimum sea crossing distance between the islands reached 80 km within a millennium of their separation. Predicted maximum population sizes for Malta following disconnection from Sicily start at 419 individuals and drop to 170 individuals by 9,000 years ago—not long before the first evidence of human occupation. As this is well below the minimum population size for long-term viability, the authors conclude that the longevity of forager inhabitation on Malta must have relied upon repeated, long-distance sea crossings. Malta may have been a seasonal destination, or occupied for longer periods. According to the authors, the prospect of seafaring Mesolithic hunter-gatherers has implications for the demographic and cultural world of the Mediterranean before farming, as well as the origins of European hunter-gatherer ancestry in North Africa.

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Journal

PNAS Nexus

Article Title

Life on the edge: Mesolithic population size and viability on Malta

Earliest Mediterranean long-distance sea journeys were sustained over at least a millennium

The discovery that remote Mediterranean islands were colonised before the invention of agriculture has upended long-standing views about the maritime capabilities of Europe’s last hunter-gatherers.

New evidence from Malta published today (28 July 2026) in PNAS Nexus now shows that these hunter-gatherers were engaging in repeated long-distance sea journeys of at least 100km, likely between Sicily and Malta for at least a millennium.

The study, led by Dr Jimbob Blinkhorn of the University of Liverpool with Professor Eleanor Scerri of the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology and colleagues from the University of Malta and University of Cambridge, showed that the Maltese Islands were too small to sustain a hunter-gatherer population large enough to survive in isolation for centuries. The continuous presence of hunter-gatherers in Malta for a millennium can only be explained if the occupation was supported by overseas social networks underpinned by repeated long-distance sea voyaging.

“The ability to engage in long-distance seafaring marks a major transition in human history, in which previously impassable maritime barriers became the frontiers of new connections. In the Mediterranean, single-stage, long-distance open-water sea voyaging is first documented in the Mesolithic.” Explains Professor Eleanor Scerri, a senior author on the study. “On Malta, we documented a continuous Mesolithic presence from at least 8400 to 7400 years ago. Was this an accidental stranding, however, or is it representative of a previously unknown seagoing network?”

To answer the question, the research team, led by the University of Liverpool’s Computational Archaeology of the Stone Age group, combined insights from modern ethnography with palaeoclimate data and sea-level models to examine likely hunter-gatherer population sizes and long-term survival possibilities.

“Unlike farmers, hunter-gatherers are dependent on wild, natural food resources, whose abundance is largely governed by the climate for a given area, with larger areas and more productive environments able to support larger populations,” says Dr Blinkhorn, the lead author of the study. “By modelling the relationship between modern hunter-gatherer population sizes and their environment, we were able to predict potential past population sizes using high-resolution palaeoclimate datasets. While Malta was once connected to Sicily via a land-bridge, this was inundated by around 14 thousand years ago, cutting Malta off and limiting the land area to support hunter-gatherer populations.”

The study’s estimates showed that the maximum possible population size Malta could have supported after its isolation from Sicily ranged between 170-144 individuals, with more realistic, ethnographic-derived predictions estimating a considerably smaller population. This low population density prediction spans the 1000-year timeframe that recent archaeological discoveries document hunter-gatherer occupation of Malta

“Long-term survival of a population, such as over a millennium evident in the archaeological record, would require 500-1000 reproductive-age adults, before we include the young and the elderly,” explains Dr Blinkhorn. “Given that we predict far smaller population sizes in Malta, these hunter-gatherers must have been connected to a wider gene pool to prevent inbreeding and collapse – the only way this would be possible is through repeated, overseas connections.”

“Our study proves that Malta was part of a hitherto unknown, sustained, long-distance sea voyaging network,” adds Professor Scerri. “The last European hunter-gatherers were not only reconfiguring the use of land and sea in a way that preempts the modern world, they were also maintaining social networks in ways we don’t see before, connecting islands and coastlines, perhaps even across continents.”

Dr Blinkhorn is supported by a University of Liverpool University Research Fellowship. The research was funded by a European Research Council Grant awarded to Professor Scerri.

Click here to read the article in PNAS Nexus. 

Three new kings, and a new understanding of the Assyrian King List

 

For approximately a century, researchers studying the Assyrian Empire’s history have relied on the Assyrian King List (AKL) as the definitive record of Assyrian monarchs and their chronology, especially for later periods of Assyrian history. But a recent article published in the Journal of Cuneiform Studies, entitled “Three New Kings of Assyria,” posits that the AKL may not be as authoritative or as objective as previously considered, and presents for the first time the identities of three kings whose reigns were omitted from the list, but can now reconstructed from other evidence. Ultimately, write Alexander Johannes Edmonds and Eckart Frahm, “early Neo-Assyrian political history was much messier, but also more interesting, than has so far been recognized.”

The first previously overlooked king revealed by Edmonds and Frahm called himself Tiglath-pileser, after a former ruler of the kingdom. This new Tiglath-pileser ruled in parallel to the official king, Aššur-dān III, who was his nephew, and whom he attempted to overthrow in the wake of a portentous solar eclipse. Records of his administration persist in a clay tablet housed in the British Museum that is inscribed with a royal grant, and suggest that he reigned from roughly 763-762 BCE before he was deposed.

Evidence for the second king comes from a stela discovered in 1894 in Tell ‘Abta, Iraq, and the long-standing controversy surrounding the overwriting of the name of the contemporary Assyrian monarch on the stela with that of another “Tiglath-pileser.” This mystery can be put to rest, write Edmonds and Frahm, through the admission of another monarch to the list of kings, a Shalmaneser who reigned immediately prior to the accession of Tiglath-pileser III in 745 BCE.

The third case investigated by Edmonds and Frahm is that of Aššur-uballiṭ. In a text on a cuneiform tablet, king Tukultī-Ninurta II describes a libation vessel created by Tukultī-Ninurta I and later restored by Aššur-uballit—but no monarch of that name is recorded in the AKL between Tukultī-Ninurta I and Tukultī-Ninurta II. The reign from 913-912 BCE of a previously unremarked Aššur-uballit, write Edmonds and Frahm, would explain this reference, as well as the identity of a king represented by a statue discovered at Aššur whose head has been removed and whose arms and insignia are worn away.

The existence of these three kings, write the authors, invites a reconsideration of the AKL. Perhaps it is not “an impartial chronographic work” but rather "a legitimizing canon of kings, which was periodically updated to remove short-lived or parallel Neo-Assyrian rulers." This political dimension of the AKL, Edmonds and Frahm continue, opens up new ways of studying the list: “What and who determined a king’s ‘canonicity’? How did this intersect with Assyrian cultural memory or notions of kingship? Was the AKL’s function at all practical, or solely ceremonial?” With three hidden stories uncovered—so far—the AKL becomes a renewed object of interest and inquiry. In turn, the early history of the Assyrian Empire has suddenly become much more complicated, but also exciting than previously thought. As such, Edmonds and Frahm’s discovery offers a dynamic new perspective on the formation of the world’s first empire.

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Journal

Journal of Cuneiform Studies

DOI

10.1086/741239 

Archaic human parents also had a hard time raising kids

 

Deformed head shapes in fossilized humans show their infants were probably just as helpless as modern human babies, requiring constant parental care

Peer-Reviewed Publication

University of Tokyo

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The crosses on these graphs represent the great apes (violet = P. troglodytes, blue = P. paniscus, orange = Pongo, black = Gorilla), while the light blue circles = H. sapiens, and red stars = fossil Homo (LB = Liang Bua, Ng = Ngandong, Sm = Sambungmacan). The further the point is from 0 on the vertical axis, the greater the distortion. On the right, the density curves show the distributions of the pooled great ape (dotted line) and modern human (solid line). 

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Credit: Kaifu Y et al. 2026 CC BY

Archaic human parents had to look after helpless infants like modern day parents do, according to new research. Human babies are born less developed than those of other great apes, and so are unable to move as freely. A common result of this is deformational plagiocephaly, also called flat head syndrome. Professor Yousuke Kaifu at the University of Tokyo led a team which studied head shapes from scans of living infants, historical Japanese skeletal remains, fossilized specimens of Homo erectus and Homo floresiensis, and compared these to measurements of dry skulls from other great apes. Human head shapes across the ages, as well as the fossilized samples, exhibited a far wider range of deformation. The team sees this as evidence that archaic humans birthed helpless infants, with implications for childcare practices and potentially cooperative social behaviors dating back hundreds of thousands of years.

Many parents understand the fear of taking a fragile newborn home. Compared to other great apes – large primates classified in the same family as humans – our children are born completely helpless, with weak neck muscles, soft cranial bones and still underdeveloped brains, which continue to grow rapidly after birth. 

One theory for this, called the obstetrical dilemma, sees it as a trade-off for being able to walk upright (which affects the shape of the birth canal) and have large-brained offspring. But when in our evolutionary timeline did this helpless newborn phase – and the parental responsibilities which go with it – begin? 

It is a difficult question to answer. Fossils of our archaic ancestors are mostly fragmented and rarely of infants. However, a new approach, which can be applied to fossils of any maturity, may provide the evidence researchers have been looking for.   

“Our method looks for changes in the shape of the cranium (the top part of the skull) which occurred around or soon after birth and remained to some extent into adulthood,” explained Kaifu from the University Museum at the University of Tokyo. “Nowadays, this is a common condition, called deformational plagiocephaly. The shape of the head is affected by the baby lying the same way frequently due to how they are held or laid down, and from the baby’s neck muscles being too weak to control the position of the head.”

Kaifu was inspired after visiting the skeleton of Homo floresiensis (who lived more than 50,000 years ago) in Indonesia in 2007. He was struck by the deformed shape of their skull which, from the structure of the bones, appeared to have occurred after birth. To understand why, he contacted a hospital clinician who identified the cause as deformational plagiocephaly. 

This led Kaifu to theorize that skull deformation, which can be identified as not being caused by disease or post-burial, may be an indicator of helplessness in infancy, as it implies a soft, underdeveloped skull and head immobility.

To test this theory, he gathered a team including researchers from Japan and Indonesia to collect and compare CT scans of 123 modern, healthy infants aged from 1 day to 17 months old, measurements from historical human skulls from Japan dated from about 200 to 1,000 years old (385 people in total), great ape skulls (996 individuals), and fossilized human skulls of Homo erectus (five fossils) and Homo floresiensis (one fossil). 

From the results, the team could see that other great apes – including chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans – which are born more physically independent and capable, were grouped within a narrower range of cranial deformity. The human samples – including fossilized specimens – exhibited a much broader range of deformation and head shapes.

“This was exciting as we don’t know a lot about the behavior of Homo erectus. They lived between more than 1 million to 110,000 years ago, and we only have a tiny archaeological record from their stone tools. However, if they gave birth to physically helpless babies, then this tells us something about their behaviors, as they would need to have cared for the baby as diligently as we do,” said Kaifu. “This likely would have necessitated some social interactions, as it would be difficult for the mother to care for and protect the newborn in that environment, where there would have been other large predators, on her own.” 

Another surprising outcome of the research was the level of head deformation in Homo floresiensis. Diminutive in stature (affectionately referred to as the “hobbit”), their brain was also much smaller, comparable in size to a chimpanzee, so it is unknown why their situation wasn’t more similar to other great apes.

“Even though their brain size was much smaller, their newborn stage was already following the same kind of difficult process as larger-brained modern human ancestors,” said Kaifu. “Rather than just being a trade-off for our large brains, the challenging responsibility of childcare and supporting mothers with their infants may actually be an integral part of our human history, at least since the time of the common ancestor of Homo erectus and Homo floresiensis more than 1 million years ago.” 

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Paper:
Yousuke Kaifu, Wataru Yano, Makoto Hikosaka, Daisuke Shimizu, Takeshi Nishimura, Daisuke Kubo, Rusyad Adi Suriyanto, Jatmiko, Thomas Sutikna, Naoki Morimoto and Iwan Kurniawan. “Cranial evidence for human-like helpless infancy in Homo erectus and Homo floresiensis”, Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Date: July 29th, 2026. DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2026.1055 

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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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