Archaeologists develop method of identifying intestinal parasites concealed within 1,500-year-old ‘chamber pot’. New technique helps distinguish portable toilets from other jars and ceramic vessels, leading to greater understanding of gut health in the past.

A global team of climate risk and heritage experts have provided the first comprehensive assessment of exposure of African cultural and natural Heritage Sites to extreme sea levels and erosion associated with accelerating Sea Level Rise.

A new study in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution uses pollen data to evaluate the second plague pandemic’s mortality at a regional scale across Europe. Results show that the impacts of the Black Death varied substantially from region to region and demonstrate the importance of cross-disciplinary approaches for understanding past – and present – pandemics.

When the anatomist Georg Thilenius excavated a number of skulls and skeletons on the island of Maui in 1897, he violated the prevailing Hawaiian laws that prohibited the removal of human remains from burial sites. Nevertheless, the stolen iwi kūpuna (ancestral Hawaiian skeletal remains) reached the University of Göttingen via the Hamburg Museum of Ethnology in 1953. On Wednesday 9 February 2022, thirteen iwi kūpuna were returned to their descendants from Hawaiʻi during a ceremonial event.

What a person eats influences a person’s health, longevity and experience in the world. Identifying the factors that determine people’s diets is important to answer the bigger questions, such as how changing climates will influence unequal access to preferred foods. A new study provides a blueprint to systematically untangle and evaluate the power of both climate and population size on the varied diets across a region in the past.

The research has been published by the official journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and is entitled ‘Ancient DNA at the edge of the world: Continental immigration and the persistence of Neolithic male lineages in Bronze Age Orkney’ by Katharina Dulias, George Foody, Pierre Justeau et al.