Research Briefing |
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| Open AccessThe Anglo-Saxon migration and the formation of the early English gene pool
Archaeogenetic study of ancient DNA from medieval northwestern Europeans reveals substantial increase of continental northern European ancestry in Britain, suggesting mass migration across the North Sea during the Early Middle Ages.
- Joscha Gretzinger
- , Duncan Sayer
- & Stephan Schiffels
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Obituary |
Frank Drake (1930–2022)
Radioastronomer who hunted for alien signals and penned the eponymous equation.
- Sarah Scoles
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News & Views |
Earliest known surgery was of a child in Borneo 31,000 years ago
Evidence that a child in a hunter-gatherer society survived amputation offers a remarkable insight into the origins of surgery. It challenges the current view that such procedures emerged alongside farming some 10,000 years ago.
- Charlotte Ann Roberts
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News |
Prehistoric child’s amputation is oldest surgery of its kind
Skeleton missing lower left leg and dated to 31,000 years ago provides the earliest known evidence for surgical limb removal.
- McKenzie Prillaman
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Article
| Open AccessSurgical amputation of a limb 31,000 years ago in Borneo
Around 31,000 years ago, a young individual from Borneo had part of their left lower leg surgically amputated, probably as a child, and lived for another 6–9 years after amputation.
- Tim Ryan Maloney
- , India Ella Dilkes-Hall
- & Maxime Aubert
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Nature Podcast |
Missing foot reveals world’s oldest amputation
A 31,000-year-old skeleton shows evidence of complex surgery, and the latest from the Nature Briefing.
- Benjamin Thompson
- & Nick Petrić Howe
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Article |
Postcranial evidence of late Miocene hominin bipedalism in Chad
Analyses of a thigh bone and a pair of elbow bones from Sahelanthropus tchadensis discovered in Chad suggest that the earliest hominin exhibited bipedalism with substantial arboreal clambering.
- G. Daver
- , F. Guy
- & N. D. Clarisse
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News |
Ancient tooth DNA reveals how ‘cold sore’ herpes virus has evolved
Teeth from long-dead people and animals are divulging the history of modern pathogens.
- Freda Kreier
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Research Highlight |
Mysterious ancient chemical formulae are decoded at last
Studies of Chinese coins reveal the composition of Jin and Xi — and hint at unexpected complexity in metallurgy.
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News Round-Up |
COVID antiviral, carbon-dating troubles and Chile’s science bet
The latest science news, in brief.
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Research Highlight |
Bones and weapons show just how far south pre-industrial humans got
Artefacts exposed by penguins are the remnants of a hunting camp on Hornos Island off Chile.
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News & Views |
The mystery of early milk consumption in Europe
What underpins how humans evolved the capacity to consume milk during adulthood? A look at the connection between health and the genetic changes needed to break down milk offers a surprising new perspective.
- Shevan Wilkin
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Nature Podcast |
How humans adapted to digest lactose — after thousands of years of milk drinking
How the ability to digest milk spread long after people started drinking it, and assessing therapeutic ketamine’s addiction potential.
- Benjamin Thompson
- & Nick Petrić Howe
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News |
Carbon dating hampered by rising fossil-fuel emissions
Archaeologists will increasingly have to rely on other techniques as emissions continue to alter the composition of carbon isotopes in air.
- Nicola Jones
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News |
How humans’ ability to digest milk evolved from famine and disease
Landmark study is the first major effort to quantify how lactose tolerance developed.
- Ewen Callaway
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News |
Russia’s war in Ukraine is disrupting studies of ancient life
Russia has been at the centre of major palaeontological finds including the Denisovans, but its brutal war is threatening the research that uncovers the past.
- Freda Kreier
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Career Q&A |
My work digging up the shelters of our ancestors
Ludovic Slimak, a cultural anthropologist at the CNRS and the University of Toulouse — Jean Jaurès, describes his research and the changing face of archaeology in France.
- Nic Fleming
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Research Highlight |
Coins from Pompeii’s ruins hint at finances of the dead
The small change suggests that many of those killed by Mount Vesuvius were of modest means.
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Nature Video |
Lasers reveal ancient pyramids and canals hidden in the Amazon
Hundreds of new archaeological sites have been discovered beneath the trees.
- Shamini Bundell
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News & Views |
Large-scale early urban settlements in Amazonia
An aerial technique that can capture hidden signs of human modifications of ancient landscapes has provided data that will prompt a rethink about the types of settlement inhabited by early societies in the Amazon region.
- Christopher T. Fisher
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Nature Podcast |
X-ray analysis hints at answers to fossil mystery
New insights into a mysterious fossil animal, and uncovering ancient settlements hidden in the Bolivian Amazon.
- Benjamin Thompson
- & Noah Baker
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News |
‘Mind blowing’ ancient settlements uncovered in the Amazon
The urban centres are the first to be discovered in the region, challenging archaeological dogma.
- Freda Kreier
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Article
| Open AccessLidar reveals pre-Hispanic low-density urbanism in the Bolivian Amazon
Two remarkably large sites in southwest Amazonia, belonging to the Casarabe culture, include complex civic-ceremonial architecture and large water-management infrastructure, representing a type of tropical low-density urbanism that has not previously been described in Amazonia.
- Heiko Prümers
- , Carla Jaimes Betancourt
- & Martin Schaich
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Research Highlight |
Cramped chamber hides some of North America’s biggest cave art
Technique reveals engravings more than 2 metres tall in an underground cavern in Alabama.
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Research Highlight |
Deer symbol hints at early adoption of Maya calendar
Fragments from Guatemalan pyramid ruins suggest the system was already in use more than 2,200 years ago.
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Research Highlight |
Inca sacrifice victims were given ayahuasca
Traces of the psychoactive substance in mummies might be the earliest evidence of its use as an antidepressant.
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News & Views |
A lengthy look at climate and its role in hominin evolution
Climate effects on ecosystems shaped the evolution of our hominin relatives in the human family tree. A modelling study examines these habitat changes and the various ways in which they influenced hominin species.
- Michael D. Petraglia
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News |
Record-breaking simulation hints at how climate shaped human migration
Model suggests that a shift in weather patterns in southern Africa might have contributed to the rise of Homo sapiens.
- Freda Kreier
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Article
| Open AccessClimate effects on archaic human habitats and species successions
A new model simulation of climate change during the past 2 million years indicates that the appearances and disappearances of hominin species correlate with long-term climatic anomalies.
- Axel Timmermann
- , Kyung-Sook Yun
- & Andrey Ganopolski
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News & Views |
From the archive: Tutankhanum’s tomb, and a floating fish nest from Bermuda
Snippets from Nature’s past.
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News & Views |
From the archive: Mary Leakey’s book on excavations in Africa, and physics teaching under scrutiny
Snippets from Nature’s past.
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News |
Ancient smells reveal secrets of Egyptian tomb
Jars contained fish, fruit and beeswax balm to sustain the tomb’s residents in the afterlife.
- Colin Barras
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World View |
Study conspiracy theories with compassion
The societal forces that drive people to join a belief system matter more than the specifics of what they believe.
- Elżbieta Drążkiewicz
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Research Highlight |
Ancient ‘harbour’ revealed to be part of fertility god’s lavish shrine
Re-examination of an artificial body of water uncovers its true purpose as a ritual pool dedicated to the god Ba’al.
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News & Views |
AI minds the gap and fills in missing Greek inscriptions
The use of artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming many areas of research. A new AI tool helps to fill in missing text and estimate the timeframe and geographical origin of ancient inscriptions.
- Charlotte Roueché
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Article
| Open AccessRestoring and attributing ancient texts using deep neural networks
Ithaca—a deep neural network for textual restoration, geographical attribution and dating of ancient Greek inscriptions—collaboratively aids historians’ study of damaged texts.
- Yannis Assael
- , Thea Sommerschield
- & Nando de Freitas
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Article |
Innovative ochre processing and tool use in China 40,000 years ago
A cultural assembly of traits at a 40,000-year-old archaeological site at Xiamabei, China supports a model of repeated early human expansions, cultural exchange and innovation in east Asia.
- Fa-Gang Wang
- , Shi-Xia Yang
- & Michael Petraglia
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News & Views |
From the archive
Nature’s pages feature a look at some books for travellers, and success reported in the effort to preserve a Stone Age monument.
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Research Briefing |
Ancient DNA illuminates how humans travelled and interacted in Stone Age Africa
Archaeologists have various hypotheses for how populations changed in Africa about 50,000 years ago, during the Later Stone Age transition. Now, the earliest available ancient-DNA sequences from sub-Saharan Africa reveal a complex Late Pleistocene population structure, pointing to large shifts in human movement and in patterns of social interaction.
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Article
| Open AccessAncient DNA and deep population structure in sub-Saharan African foragers
DNA analysis of 6 individuals from eastern and south-central Africa spanning the past approximately 18,000 years, and of 28 previously published ancient individuals, provides genetic evidence supporting hypotheses of increasing regionalization at the end of the Pleistocene.
- Mark Lipson
- , Elizabeth A. Sawchuk
- & Mary E. Prendergast
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News Round-Up |
Earliest humans, HIV variant and breakthrough COVID
The latest science news, in brief.
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News |
Evidence of Europe’s first Homo sapiens found in French cave
Stone artefacts and tooth pre-date the earliest known evidence of the species in Europe by more than 10,000 years.
- Ewen Callaway
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Research Highlight |
‘Spines on posts’ hint at ancient devotion to the dead
Indigenous people in what is now Peru partially re-assembled human skeletons, perhaps after desecration by European tomb robbers.
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Research Highlight |
Early Arabian capital survives vandals — and reveals a quest for the ultimate camel
Militants who occupied the centuries-old city of Hatra left behind artwork depicting hybrid camels.
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News Feature |
Did a mega drought topple empires 4,200 years ago?
People abandoned thriving cities in Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley and farther afield at about the same time as a decades-long drought gripped parts of the planet.
- Michael Marshall
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News & Views |
From the archive
Nature’s pages examine attempts to reconstruct ancient systems for desert agriculture, and report efforts to honour Charles Darwin in France.
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Where I Work |
The ancient whale from my Egyptian home town
Abdullah Gohar studies fossils from the Faiyum Depression, which occurred where he grew up.
- Jack Leeming
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Research Highlight |
‘Sceptres’ found in ancient tomb were actually beer straws
Metal tubes dating back millennia are the oldest surviving drinking straws.