News by Subject Archaeology

Humans cannot live on protein alone - even for the ancient indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest whose diet was once thought to be almost all salmon. In a new paper, anthropologists argue such a protein-heavy diet would be unsustainable and document the many dietary solutions ancient Pacific Coast people in North America likely employed to avoid "salmon starvation," a toxic and potentially fatal condition brought on by eating too much lean protein.

A new paper urges archaeologists and history professionals to work closely with people who are grappling with racism in public monuments and institutional names in the wake of last year's uprising following the killing of George Floyd. The authors argue that by working with "broad publics who are actively dictating what should be preserved and what should not the field can begin to redress the harm it has perpetuated."

Bishop Peder Winstrup died in 1679, and is one of the most well-preserved human bodies from the 1600s. Researchers at Lund University in Sweden may now have solved the mystery of why a foetus was hidden in his coffin in Lund Cathedral. DNA from the bishop and the foetus, along with kinship analyses, has shown that the child was probably the bishop's own grandson.

In an article published in Nature Ecology & Evolution, researchers analyse the genome of an almost complete skull first discovered in Zlatý K??, Czechia in the early 1950s and now stored in the National Museum in Prague. The segments of Neanderthal DNA in its genome were longer than those of the Ust'-Ishim individual from Siberia, the previous oldest modern human sequenced, suggesting modern humans lived in the heart of Europe more than 45,000 years ago.