A research project led by the Universitat Rovira i Virgili (URV) and the Max Planck Institute has studied the remains of 25 individuals buried between the 12th and 15th centuries in the castle at Zorita de los Canes, Guadalajara. After exhuming the remains from the castle's cemetery, the research team was able to determine the diet, lifestyle and causes of death of the warrior monks, who were members of the Order of Calatrava.

The results, published in the journal Scientific Reports, have determined that 23 of the individuals died in battle and that the knights of the order followed a diet typical of medieval high society, with a considerable intake of animal protein and marine fish, in an area far from the coast. Unexpectedly, Carme Rissech, a researcher at the URV, identified the remains of a woman among the warrior monks.

Considered the oldest known horse sculpture made by anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens), this horse-shaped figurine is carved out of mammoth ivory. The palm-sized artifact measures roughly 1 inch (2.5 centimeters) high and 1.9 inches (4.8 cm) long and includes details such as a carved mouth, nostrils, eyes and mane. Although the ivory horse's head is complete, all four of its legs have been broken off. Archaeologists think the sculpture depicts a stallion, according to the Bradshaw Foundation, which asks, "Is this a stallion trying to impress a mare or a horse arching and kicking backwards against a predator?"

Neanderthals who lived 50,000 years ago were infected with three viruses that still affect modern humans today, researchers have discovered.

These traces of ancient viruses are the oldest remnants of human viruses ever discovered, New Scientist reported. They are around 20,000 years older than the previous record-holder for the most ancient human virus ever found: a common-cold virus uncovered inside a pair of 31,000-year-old baby teeth in Siberia.

Scientists found the ancient viruses after sifting through DNA sequences drawn from the skeletons of two male Neanderthals originally found in the Chagyrskaya cave, located in the Altai mountains in Russia. Several sequences appeared to be viral in origin, so the team compared them to modern viruses known to cause lifelong infections. They ruled out the possibility that the viruses came from modern humans who handled the skeletons or by predators that fed on them by looking at specific signatures in the viral DNA that differed between the ancient and modern samples.

In this way, they showed that our closest, now-extinct relatives could be infected with three common, modern human viruses: a type of adenovirus, a herpesvirus and a papillomavirus.

Irene Solano Megías, a predoctoral researcher at the Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana (CENIEH), has just published the first techno-typological study of the most ancient lithic industry of level VI-B at the Mumba rockshelter in the journal African Archaeological Review. This site lies in the Lake Eyasi region in Tanzania, and the study has enabled better understanding of the activity of human groups in this region.

This is one of the most important sites in northern Tanzania from the period known as the Middle Stone Age (MSA). It was excavated in the 1930s and level VI-B was excavated between 1977 and 1981, but no data had been published until now.

According to the new study, the level VI-B lithic assemblage at Mumba is the result of settlement by groups of Homo sapiens present in the Lake Eyasi region between 109,000 and 131,000 years ago.

An Oregon State University study has found evidence that Indigenous groups in the Pacific Northwest were intentionally harvesting edible camas bulbs at optimal stages of the plant's maturation as far back as 3,500 years ago.

The findings contribute to the growing body of research around Traditional Ecological Knowledge and practices, demonstrating the care and specificity with which Indigenous groups have been stewarding and cultivating natural resources for millennia. The work is published in The Holocene journal.

Camas is an ecological and cultural keystone, meaning it is a species on which many other organisms depend and that it features prominently within many cultural practices.

"If you think about salmon as being a charismatic species that people are very familiar with, camas is kind of the plant equivalent," said Molly Carney, an assistant professor of anthropology in OSU's College of Liberal Arts and lead author on the study. "It is one of those species that really holds up greater ecosystems, a fundamental species which everything is related to."

A nearly 130,000-year-old bear bone was deliberately marked with cuts and might be one of the oldest art pieces in Eurasia crafted by the Neanderthals, researchers say.

The roughly cylindrical bone, which is about 4 inches long (10.6 centimeters), is adorned with 17 irregularly spaced parallel cuts. A right-handed person most likely crafted the piece, probably in one sitting, a new study finds.

The carved bone is the oldest known symbolic art made by Neanderthals in Europe north of the Carpathian Mountains. It gives scientists a glimpse into the behavior, cognition and culture of modern humans' long-dead cousins, who lived in Eurasia from about 400,000 to 40,000 years ago, when they disappeared.

Raquel Hernando, a Juan de la Cierva researcher associated with the European project TIED2TEETH, at the Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana (CENIEH), is the lead author of a paper published in the American Journal of Biological Anthropology, in which the teeth of 84 adult individuals found at eight sites in the northeast Iberian Peninsula were analyzed to offer new perspectives on the diet of these populations in recent prehistory.

This study shows that the mixed diet of the agropastoral groups of this period, which covers from the Middle Neolithic to the Middle Bronze Age, was made up of cereals with regular intake of meat or dairy products, though each group had its own dietary specialization.

A rare dye made from snails for the robes of the Roman elite almost 2,000 years ago has been unearthed at a cricket club.

The chunk of Tyrian purple, roughly the size of a ping pong ball, was dug up at Carlisle Cricket Club as part of ongoing yearly excavations.

A Roman bathhouse was discovered at the site in 2017 and in the last three years 2,000 items including pottery, weapons, coins and semi-precious stones have been found.

Flint is on mastodon: @FlintDibble@archaeo.social

I liked JRE years before covid, but stopped for obvious reasons. Finally got around to listening to this. He did an excellent job, worth a listen I promise!

It has long been thought that meat played an important role in the diet of hunter-gatherers before the Neolithic transition. However, due to the scarcity of well-preserved human remains from Paleolithic sites, little information exists about the dietary habits of pre-agricultural human groups. A new study challenges this notion by presenting compelling isotopic evidence of a strong preference for plants among 15,000-year-old hunter-gatherers from Morocco. This is the first time a significant amount of plant consumption has been measured for a pre-agricultural population, shedding new light on the dietary practices of ancient human societies.