Evolutionary Insights by Anthropology.net

At the Ōzuka tomb, five horses parade across the stone gateway leading into the burial chamber. Their eyes are large and deliberate. Their harnesses are picked out in careful color. You can tell, from the way the artist rendered their bodies, which animals are male and which are female. Riding them are six human figures, and every one of them is a stick. No faces. No sex. One rider is drawn at roughly a quarter the size of his own horse.
This wasn’t a failure of skill. The same hands that gave the horses anatomical precision chose, apparently on purpose, to leave the people blank. A new study by Claudia Zancan, published in Antiquity, argues that this wasn’t an isolated quirk of one tomb but a consistent regional pattern across the decorated tombs of Kyushu, Japan’s southernmost island, and that the pattern tells us something specific about how these communities thought about death.
A Regional Style That Refused to Individualize
Kyushu sits closest to the Korean Peninsula of any part of Japan, and during the sixth and seventh centuries it absorbed plenty of continental influence. Across the water, Koguryŏ tombs painted the dead as dominant, detailed figures towering over their servants and animals, exactly the kind of imagery you’d expect from an elite burial tradition that wanted to broadcast the status of the person inside. Kyushu had access to that visual vocabulary. It didn’t use it.
Zancan’s study systematically catalogued anthropomorphic figures across 38 decorated tombs, 20 painted and 18 rock-cut, and found the same thing again and again: human figures rendered smaller than the objects around them, stripped of individualizing detail, and, in every single case in the sample, impossible to sex. Not one figure across the entire corpus shows primary or secondary sexual characteristics, even in tombs where the artists were clearly capable of that level of detail. Compare that to contemporary Kyushu funerary sculpture like sekijin stone figures or the haniwa of the Kanto region, both of which do occasionally mark sex and social role. The anonymity in the tomb paintings looks like a choice, not a limitation.
This matters because the period itself was a moment of real transformation in Japanese mortuary practice. Older Kofun-period burials were sealed pits, built once and closed for good. The horizontal stone chambers that appear in the Late Kofun period could be reopened, over and over, for successive interments. A tomb stopped being a monument to one death and became a space for ongoing ritual. Zancan’s argument is that the imagery inside these chambers reflects that shift. If a tomb is going to be reopened for generations, its decoration doesn’t need to commemorate the specific person laid to rest last. It needs to do something else.
Borrowing a classification system originally built for Iberian rock art, Zancan mapped where the human figures actually sit within the architecture of each tomb, and three locations kept recurring. On the exterior façades of rock-cut tombs, figures appear holding weapons, facing outward, and these are the only figures in the entire corpus with anything resembling faces. They read as guardians, warding off whatever might approach from outside. Inside, at the entrance to the burial chamber, a second set of figures marks the threshold itself, the physical and symbolic boundary between the world of the living and the world of the dead. This is architecturally and mythologically loaded ground in Japanese tradition. It’s the same threshold where the god Izanagi, in the origin myth, searches for his dead wife Izanami and finds her transformed by the underworld. And at the very back of the chamber, on the rear wall closest to where the body would be laid, the human figures shrink to their smallest scale of all.
None of these three positions functions as a portrait spot. Read together, they sketch a route: guarded threshold, liminal crossing, final resting place. The figures aren’t depicting who died. They’re depicting the passage every dead person takes to become an ancestor.
What the Human Figure Was Actually For
There’s a reflex, when looking at a burial, to go looking for the individual. Sex, rank, personal effects, some marker of who this specific person was in life. Zancan’s study is essentially an argument against applying that reflex here. The tombs of Kyushu weren’t organized around commemorating a particular Homo sapiens life. They were organized around a process, a transition from person to ancestor, and the human figures in the paintings were symbolic participants in that process rather than likenesses of anyone in particular.
That reframes what the small size and blank faces are actually doing. They aren’t evidence of an underdeveloped visual tradition sitting in the shadow of more sophisticated continental art. They’re evidence of a community using abstraction on purpose, choosing anonymity as a way of expressing something collective rather than personal. Scale, in these tombs, seems to track ritual importance rather than realism. The horses at Ōzuka are large because horses carried real symbolic weight in the funerary procession being depicted. The riders are small because whoever they represent doesn’t matter as an individual. What matters is that someone is making the journey.
Zancan notes that this pattern has never been systematically tested outside Kyushu, and much of the physical evidence needed to test it is disappearing. Pigment degrades. Stone erodes. Some of these tombs have already lost the imagery that would let anyone verify whether the same rules of anonymity and placement hold elsewhere in Japan. Whatever answer that question eventually gets, it’s going to depend on how much of this material survives long enough to be looked at again.


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A drained lakebed in the mountains of Jotunheimen doesn’t look like much: gray silt, exposed stone, the odd meltwater channel cutting through it. But in 2022, when the water level at Lake Tesse dropped for its usual spring maintenance, someone walking the exposed mud spotted wood poking out of the ground. Not driftwood. Poles. Dozens of them, still standing upright where they’d been driven into the lakebed, arranged in a tight circular chamber with a fence of angled supports leading into it. A fish trap.
That alone wouldn’t be remarkable. People have been building lattice-wall fish traps in Scandinavia for millennia, and the type is well documented from wetland sites across northwestern Europe going back to around 4000 BC. What made this one strange was the radiocarbon date.
The trap was closer to 4950 BC. And it sat in a lake that, by every reconstruction of the region’s glacial and hydrological history, should not have had fish in it at all.
A landscape with a locked door
Lake Tesse sits at 854 meters above sea level in the central Norwegian mountains, fed and drained by a river system that eventually reaches the Oslofjord. The ice sheet that covered this terrain for most of the last glacial period didn’t finish retreating from the area until around 8400 BC. Once it did, the landscape opened up fast, both to colonizing plants and animals and to the hunter-fisher-gatherer groups moving in from the coasts. Fish followed too, but only where they could. In the lowlands, trout, pike, and a couple dozen other species swam upstream from the sea and from the shrinking freshwater and brackish remnants of the Baltic as relative sea levels dropped through the Early Holocene.
Above a certain elevation, that migration hit a wall. Literally: waterfalls and steep gradients along the Tessa River made it physically impossible for fish to swim up into Lake Tesse from the watercourses below. Historically, the lower stretches of that same river system supported around twenty-five species. The upper stretches, cut off by the falls, supported exactly one: brown trout. Not because brown trout were better adapted to alpine conditions than everything else. Because brown trout were the only species that ever got up there, and they didn’t get up there on their own.
That’s the setup the new paper, published in Antiquity by Axel Mjærum and colleagues at the University of Oslo, is working with. If fish couldn’t climb the falls, and Lake Tesse had fish anyway, something else put them there. The obvious candidate, in a lake that’s been renowned since the twentieth century as one of Norway’s most productive trout fisheries (it once yielded close to nine tonnes of fish a year before it was dammed for hydro-power in the 1940s), is people. The trap dating just pushes back how far that “something else” goes. Considerably.
What the poles actually show
The excavation recovered four traps in total, with 73 individual poles subjected to dendrological and radiocarbon analysis. The construction itself is unglamorous and entirely functional: small stems of Scots pine, with some birch and willow mixed in, averaging about 37 millimeters in diameter, driven vertically into the lakebed to form a circular chamber roughly 3.5 meters across, braced by poles set at 30 to 45 degree angles. Cut marks and traces of lashing show the wood was deliberately worked, not just accumulated debris. It’s the kind of trap ethnographically documented across the Nordic countries well into the twentieth century, built in spring, fished through summer, sometimes maintained and rebuilt over years.
The dating is where it gets interesting. Trap 5 comes back at roughly 4950 BC via radiocarbon on its outer tree rings, placing it squarely in the Late Mesolithic. Trap 2 dates to around 5000 BC as well. Trap 1, dated both by radiocarbon and by cross-matching against a regional pine tree-ring chronology from Jämtland, Sweden, comes out at 3850 BC, with two of its posts felled about twelve years apart, suggesting the structure was periodically rebuilt rather than used once and abandoned. Trap 3 is later still, around 2700 BC. Altogether, the traps at Tesse span more than two thousand years of use, starting in the Mesolithic and continuing well into the Neolithic, long after farming had arrived in southern Scandinavia but before it had displaced hunting, fishing, and gathering as the dominant subsistence base in this particular region.
The Tesse traps aren’t isolated evidence, either. Burned fish bone from nine other sites across the Jotunheimen and Hardangervidda mountains has produced radiocarbon dates that predate 1700 BC, five of them clustering in the fifth millennium BC, roughly contemporary with the earliest Tesse traps. Where the bones have been identified to species, they’re brown trout, and only brown trout. Given that lowland fishing assemblages from the same period are far more taxonomically diverse, that pattern is hard to explain as fish being caught elsewhere and hauled up into the mountains as preserved food. It looks instead like the same species being deliberately introduced, over and over, at multiple lakes.
Ruling out the alternative explanation matters here, because there is one on the table: birds. Waterfowl are known to carry fish eggs on their feet or feathers over short distances, and it’s been proposed as a mechanism for colonizing isolated water bodies. But the case against it in the Norwegian mountains is fairly clean. If birds were doing the work, you’d expect a scatter of species turning up unpredictably across different lakes, not the same single species appearing again and again with what looks like reasonable synchrony across a two-thousand-year window. Genetic work on modern mountain trout populations backs this up too: their population structure points to repeated, stepwise upstream translocations within river systems rather than one-off natural colonization events.
None of this is unprecedented for later periods. Fishing rights over mountain lakes show up in European texts from the fourteenth century onward, already assuming fish had been introduced. A twelfth-century Norwegian runestone references the practice explicitly. Sedimentary ancient DNA from a Spanish Pyrenean lake recently pushed the confirmed record of human fish introduction back to the seventh century AD. What the Tesse dates do is detonate that timeline. Not centuries. Millennia. And crucially, they place the origin of the practice not with farmers, but with people who had no farming at all.
Why bother moving fish into the mountains
There’s an economic logic buried in this that’s worth sitting with, because it isn’t really about fishing for its own sake. Norwegian Mesolithic hunter-fisher-gatherers, judging from rock art, faunal assemblages dominated by ungulates, and sites clustered along known elk and reindeer migration corridors, put serious cultural weight on big-game hunting. The Langfonne ice patch, just eleven kilometers from Lake Tesse, has produced evidence of reindeer hunting going back to at least the fifth millennium BC. But big-game hunting in mountain terrain is unpredictable and risky. Success rates are low, and a bad trip into the high country can mean a long stretch with nothing to show for it.
Introducing a stable population of brown trout into a mountain lake changes that calculation. Trout are calorically dense, comparatively easy to catch relative to elk or reindeer, and once established, they don’t run away or migrate elsewhere. A fish population effectively domesticates the risk profile of the mountains, turning them into something closer to the resource-rich lowland environments these groups already knew how to exploit. That, in turn, makes it feasible to stay in the mountains longer, which opens up access to other resources worth having up there: furs, lithic raw material, whatever else the terrain offers.
But getting fish into a lake that fish can’t reach on their own isn’t trivial. Someone had to catch live fish somewhere downstream, keep them alive during transport (the paper raises hide waterskins as a plausible method, given how prominent hide-processing evidence is in the Mesolithic Norwegian archaeological record), carry them upstream past the barriers that were keeping every other fish out, and release them into a lake that wouldn’t produce a harvestable population for years, possibly decades. That’s not an opportunistic act. It requires understanding fish reproduction and population growth well enough to make an investment with no immediate payoff, on the expectation that it would pay off eventually, for someone. Maybe not even the person who did the carrying.
That’s the part that quietly undoes a fairly old assumption in archaeology: that this kind of deferred, planned environmental manipulation is a hallmark of agricultural thinking, something that shows up once people start planting seeds and expecting a harvest months later. The Tesse evidence says foragers were doing versions of the same thing already, with fish, at least fifteen hundred years before farming shows up anywhere in this part of Scandinavia. Indications of contact with continental farmers appear around 5500 BC in southern Scandinavia, and actual cereal cultivation not until roughly 4200 BC. In the central Scandinavian region where Lake Tesse sits, there’s no clear evidence of interaction with farming groups during the Mesolithic at all, and hunting, gathering, and fishing remained the primary subsistence strategy until around 2200 BC.
The Tesse trout aren’t an isolated curiosity either. Mountain hares were introduced to the Baltic island of Gotland around 7000 BC, apparently to improve hunting prospects, and reintroduced again after a local extinction around 2800 BC. Hazel trees spread across post-glacial Europe partly through human agency, their nuts becoming a dietary staple while their stems went into exactly the kind of wickerwork used to build fish weirs. None of these are farming. They’re all forms of people reaching into an ecosystem and adjusting it, deliberately, for future benefit, well before anyone in the region was planting a field.
What’s easy to miss in the Tesse case is just how long the intervention lasted. The traps span from the Mesolithic into the Neolithic, rebuilt and maintained across more than two thousand years. And the population those first translocated trout founded is, by all indications, still there. Sport fishers on Lake Tesse today are catching the descendants of fish someone carried past a waterfall seven thousand years ago, for reasons that had nothing to do with agriculture and everything to do with knowing a lake, a river system, and a fish well enough to bet on a return that wouldn’t come for years.
Further Reading
* Ahlgren, H. et al. 2016. Multiple prehistoric introductions of the mountain hare (Lepus timidus) on a remote island, as revealed by ancient DNA. Journal of Biogeography 43: 1786–96. https://doi.org/10.1111/jbi.12759
* Fagín, E. et al. 2025. Parasite sedimentary DNA reveals fish introduction into a European high-mountain lake by the seventh century. Nature Communications 16. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-57801-x
* Hesthagen, T. & Sandlund, O.T. 2004. Fish distribution in a mountain area in south-eastern Norway: human introductions overrule natural immigration. Hydrobiologia 521: 49–59. https://doi.org/10.1023/B:HYDR.0000026350.93171.ba
* Pilø, L. et al. 2018. The chronology of reindeer hunting on Norway’s highest ice patches. Royal Society Open Science 5. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.171738


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Grave 311 held an eighteen-year-old whose teeth didn’t match their bones.
That mismatch is the whole story, so it’s worth sitting with it before anything else. A second molar forms in early childhood, between roughly three and eight years old, and once it’s mineralized it stays chemically frozen at that age forever. Bone collagen is different. It keeps remodeling throughout life, so it mostly records the years just before death. In this one skeleton, the two tissues told opposite stories. The dentine carried a strong signal of C4 plants, almost certainly millet, the kind of signature you’d expect from a diet common across parts of southeastern Europe. The bone collagen showed nothing of the sort, just the C3-dominated cereal diet, rye and buckwheat, typical of everyone else buried in medieval Vilnius. Strontium and oxygen values from the enamel pointed the same direction as the childhood carbon signal, away from the Vilnius region entirely, toward baselines more consistent with present-day Ukraine or southern Poland.
Put plainly: this person grew up somewhere far to the south, moved to Vilnius sometime in adolescence, and adjusted their diet to match. They died there, buried according to strict Christian custom, with no grave goods at all.
That’s a striking amount of individual biography to pull out of a skeleton. But the reason it matters goes beyond one traveler’s life story. Lithuania was, famously, the last pagan state in Europe. Grand Duke Jogaila didn’t formally adopt Catholicism until 1387. Before that, the standard picture is of a country still cremating its dead, still worshipping outside the Christian framework that had already swallowed the rest of the continent. Grave 311 belonged to a cemetery that shouldn’t, by that picture, have existed yet.
The cemetery is on Bokšto Street in Vilnius’s old town, part of a district medieval chroniclers called the Civitas Ruthenica, the Ruthenian city. Archaeologists excavated more than 500 intact graves there over eight years, and the burial customs are unambiguously Christian: bodies laid supine, oriented east to west, cross pendants and enkolpions turning up in some graves, cremation entirely absent. Radiocarbon dating places the cemetery’s use across roughly 150 years, spanning the second half of the thirteenth century through the fourteenth, meaning this Orthodox Christian community was burying its dead in a formally pagan city for a century and a half before Catholicism ever arrived.
That much was already known from the archaeology. Byzantine-style jewelry, the chaplets, the decorative headpieces made from ornaments stitched to leather and cloth, closely resembled fashions from Halych-Volhynia, a region of the former Kievan Rus’ now split between western Ukraine and southern Poland. The material culture argued for a connection. What it couldn’t do was prove that any given skeleton had actually made that journey rather than simply adopted the style secondhand. That’s the gap isotope analysis is built to close, and it’s why a research team led by Giedrė Motuzaitė Matuzevičiūtė sampled bone, dentine, and enamel from 15 individuals, layering carbon and nitrogen data against strontium and oxygen ratios and comparing everything to a local baseline built from modern plants collected around Vilnius.
A city sorted by sex
Once the isotope data came back, a pattern emerged that the grave goods alone hadn’t shown: mobility in this population was heavily gendered.
Every sampled female returned isotope values consistent with growing up locally. Not one showed the kind of childhood signature that would suggest an origin outside the Vilnius region. Several of these women were buried with grave goods, cowrie shells, glass pendants, the kinds of items that don’t fit neatly with strict Christian burial custom and read more as holdovers from older, non-Christian traditions. The team’s interpretation is that these were local women who converted, plausibly through marriage into Orthodox households, carrying older material habits into new religious ones without fully shedding them.
The men look different. Two individuals, from graves 139 and 226, had strontium ratios that fell outside the Vilnius plant baseline but matched values from Kernave, roughly 34 kilometers northwest and Lithuania’s earlier capital, hinting at movement between the two settlements rather than international migration. A third individual, from grave 214, sat close to grave 311’s outlier values, potentially another migrant from the south, though with a weaker signal. And grave 311 itself is the clearest case in the dataset: distinct in carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and strontium all at once, an eighteen-year-old who almost certainly wasn’t born anywhere near the Baltic.
There’s a curious postscript. A woman buried in grave 312, sharing the same burial pit as grave 311, turned out to be a dietary outlier herself, not as extreme, but her carbon values also pointed toward some C4 plant consumption, unusual for someone otherwise reading as local. Shared burial pits in Christian cemeteries often indicate family relationships, one interment placed above another. The authors flag this as a possible kin connection, something only ancient DNA work could confirm, but if true it would mean an immigrant household, not just an immigrant individual, took root in Vilnius and stayed.
None of this settles why people were moving. The paper lays out several plausible drivers without picking one: dynastic ties between Lithuanian dukes and Halych-Volhynia rulers that would have opened trade and diplomatic channels, Orthodox Ruthenians becoming vassals as the Grand Duchy expanded southeast and absorbed their home territories, merchants drawn by the same open invitations Grand Duke Gediminas sent across Europe in 1323, or displacement from the Black Death, which swept through the region between 1346 and 1353 and, notably, hit Eastern and Northern Europe less severely than the rest of the continent. Vilnius may simply have been a place people fled toward.
What the isotopes can’t do, and the authors are careful about this, is pin an origin more precisely than “somewhere south, plausibly Ukraine or southern Poland.” Strontium baselines overlap heavily across Eastern Europe, and with only 15 individuals sampled out of more than 500 graves, grave 311 reads less like an anomaly and more like a fluke of discovery. If one immigrant surfaced by chance in a sample this small, the real number moving through the Civitas Ruthenica over a century and a half was almost certainly larger.
Vilnius spent the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries as Europe’s last openly pagan capital. It was also, this data suggests, already running an Orthodox Christian neighborhood populated in part by people who’d walked there from hundreds of kilometers away, and by local women who married into that world and adjusted their faith without entirely letting go of their own. Two things can be true about a city at once. This one just took eight centuries and a mass spectrometer to prove it.


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The glyphs sit at the bottom of an inverted L, tucked into the corner of a room that nobody was ever meant to admire. Nine hieroglyphs of mathematics, then two more that don’t belong to any calendar system at all. So says, the text reads, followed by a name: Sak Tahn Waax. White-chested Fox.
That’s it. That’s the whole announcement. No royal titles, no cosmic parentage, no k’atun-ending fanfare. Just a scribe, somewhere around 781 CE, writing down a formula and then putting his name on it, the way anyone might sign a worksheet.
Franco D. Rossi, David Stuart, and Heather Hurst, the team that deciphered the text, are calling it the first known instance of a Classic Maya mathematician-astronomer claiming credit for intellectual work. Not an artist. Not a sculptor. Someone who did the math.
That distinction matters more than it might sound like it should.
A room full of scratch paper
Structure 10K-2 at Xultun, Guatemala, is a small masonry building that archaeologists opened in 2010 after it had spent roughly a millennium buried under fill. Its interior walls were painted with portraits of seated men bearing the title taaj, “obsidian,” a designation for ranked specialists. One wall shows the Xultun ruler Yax We’n Chan K’inich dressed as a maize deity with a scorpion’s tail. It’s a formal room, in other words, or it started as one.
What happened next is the interesting part. Someone kept coming back and writing on it. Painting numbers over the portraits. Reusing patched plaster surfaces for fresh calculations. By the time the room went out of use, it held more than 50 discrete texts crowded into the northeast corner and along the east wall: a lunar table, columns of “super numbers” divisible by both the Mars and Venus cycles, a ring number, and dense little clusters of calendrical arithmetic that have almost nothing to do with the room’s original decorative program.
Rossi, Stuart, and Hurst read this as a workspace, not a monument. The kind of place where someone was training in calendrical calculation, possibly while making bark-paper codex books, of which only four pre-Columbian examples survive anywhere, all centuries younger than this room and none of them archaeologically excavated. If that reading holds, 10K-2 is the closest thing we have to a Classic-period scriptorium caught mid-use, walls covered in the equivalent of scratch paper.
Scratch paper, notably, tends not to get signed. Most of it doesn’t say who did the arithmetic. Text 19 does.
Reading a formula that was never meant to be permanent
Reconstructing it took more than a decade. The east wall’s plaster had suffered from root growth and water infiltration, and much of Text 19 survives only as faint pigment traces. The team layered flatbed scans, infrared photography, and dStretch-processed imaging to pull 11 glyph blocks out of a surface that, to the naked eye, mostly looks like eroded stone.
What emerged is a sequence of five dates connected by four intervals, expressed in the conventional Maya vocabulary of Distance Numbers, followed by that two-glyph attribution. The whole formula spans exactly 2,920 days, which is not an arbitrary span. It’s the lowest common multiple of the 584-day Venus synodic cycle and the 365-day solar year, meaning Venus’s position relative to the sun repeats almost exactly every 2,920 days, or eight solar years, or five Venus cycles. This interval shows up constantly in Maya inscriptions, most famously in the Dresden Codex Venus tables.
What’s unusual about Text 19 isn’t the total. It’s what the scribe did inside it. Rather than dividing the 2,920 days into the five Venus periods that generated the number, he parceled it into a completely different sequence of nested intervals: 20 days, then 260, then 1,560 (two Mars cycles), then 1,080 (three 360-day Tun cycles), each interval larger than the last. Read in order, those intervals happen to follow a Fibonacci-like progression, though whether the Maya mathematician who built this recognized that pattern as such, or simply arrived at it through some other logic entirely, is not something the epigraphic record can tell us. The team is careful not to claim more than the text supports.
Nine glyphs to state the math. Then two more.
The name at the end
Cheheen, the first of those closing glyphs reads, a quotative particle that shows up elsewhere in Maya script meaning roughly “so says” or “thus spoken.” It’s the kind of marker used to attribute a statement to someone. What follows is unambiguous: SAK-TAHN-wa-xi, Sak Tahn Waax, White-chested Fox.
The authors are appropriately cautious about what this attribution actually means. It’s possible White-chested Fox calculated and painted the formula himself. It’s also possible the phrase cites him as an authority, the way a modern text might say “according to so-and-so,” crediting someone else’s method rather than one’s own hand. Either reading still makes this the only known case of a Classic Maya mathematical text naming an individual responsible for the intellectual content, as opposed to naming a king whose reign the calculations happen to serve.
That’s a strange gap in the record, when you sit with it. Maya scribes and sculptors signed things. Painted ceramics carry artists’ signatures. Carved monuments sometimes name the sculptor. Rossi, Stuart, and Hurst note that individual scribes and artists were increasingly visible in the eighth century, claiming credit for craft and style in a way that represented a real cultural shift. But the people doing the underlying astronomical and calendrical calculations, the ones whose work actually determined when kings were inaugurated or monuments erected, stayed invisible. Their results got carved in stone. Their names didn’t.
Part of the explanation may simply be genre. Formal inscriptions were built to display outcomes: coordinated dates, celestial alignments, the appearance of destiny aligning with political timing. They weren’t built to show the mechanics behind those outcomes, and mechanics are exactly what tend to carry an individual’s fingerprints. Text 19, sitting in a back room where nobody but other specialists would ever read it, had no audience to perform for. Maybe that’s precisely why a name could attach to it. There was no larger narrative for the name to compete with.
Why this text and not one of the other 50-plus in the room remains an open question the authors don’t try to resolve. Several other inscriptions in 10K-2 look, by their handwriting, like they could be the work of the same scribe. If so, White-chested Fox may have produced much of what’s on that wall, and chose to sign only the one formula that reads as a complete, self-contained composition rather than a fragment of some larger calculational tool. A finished piece, maybe, rather than a working note. It’s a guess grounded in the text’s structure, not a certainty.
Contemporaries in India, Mesopotamia, China, and Greece who worked out solar and planetary cycles have long had names attached to their achievements. Astronomy in the Classic Maya world produced calculations of comparable sophistication and, until now, no comparable names. Somewhere in northeastern Guatemala, in the final years before Xultun’s central precinct emptied out, a mathematician sat in a back room and did something that turns out to have been almost unheard of. He took credit.
Further Reading
* Saturno, W.A. et al. 2012. Ancient Maya calendrical tables from Xultun, Guatemala. Science 336: 714–717. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1221444
* Saturno, W.A. et al. 2015. To set before the king: residential mural painting at Xultun, Guatemala. Antiquity 89: 122–136. https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2014.11


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A tibia fragment from a Belgian cave had been sitting in a museum collection, confidently refitted to a particular leg bone, for years. Then researchers sequenced its DNA. It didn’t match. The fragment belonged to a different individual entirely — and only by redoing the refitting and pulling a new sample from the correct bone did the picture come clear. This is the kind of thing ancient DNA analysis does now: not just fill in population histories, but correct the physical reconstruction of bodies that died forty thousand years ago.
That correction is one small moment in a much larger study, published today in Nature, that represents the most genetically detailed look yet at the final Homo neanderthalensis populations of northwestern Europe. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and collaborating institutions recovered genetic data from 27 individuals who lived less than approximately 52,500 years ago, drawn from ten archaeological sites in Belgium and France. The findings speak directly to some of the most contested questions in Neanderthal research: how connected were these populations, how much did they interbreed with close relatives, and did genetic deterioration contribute to their extinction?
The short answers, as far as this dataset allows: more connected than previously suspected, less inbred than their eastern counterparts, and probably not dying from a genomic death spiral.
A region, not a scattered handful
Most of the sampled sites cluster in the Meuse Basin of Belgium — Goyet, Spy, Couvin, Trou Magrite, Fonds-de-Forêt, Engis, Walou — with two French sites, Saint-Césaire and Arcy-sur-Cure. The density of Middle Palaeolithic sites in this region is unusual, and that density is precisely what makes it possible to study something approaching a regional population rather than isolated individuals from distant locations.
The team generated a high-coverage genome (22.4-fold) from a Goyet individual designated GN1 — only the fifth high-coverage H. neanderthalensis genome sequenced to date. For specimens with poorer DNA preservation, they used a new hybridization capture panel called ArchaicPlus, designed to target around 2.3 million SNPs informative for Neanderthal and Denisovan variation. Combined, this approach yielded nuclear data from 19 skeletal remains across six sites.
The genetic picture that emerged is of a loosely knit regional population. Most of the Belgian and French individuals are more closely related to each other than to other contemporaneous late Neanderthals, including Vindija 33.19 from Croatia and the Mezmaiskaya individuals from the Caucasus. Their estimated population split from the Vindija lineage falls around 54,000 years ago — roughly 10,000 years before these individuals actually lived. A relatively shallow separation. Distinct, but not isolated.
What is perhaps more telling is what the genomes do not show. The H. neanderthalensis individuals from Chagyrskaya Cave in Siberia, studied a few years ago, displayed unmistakable signatures of close-relative mating: long homozygous-by-descent tracts in the genome, indicative of repeated inbreeding within a small and probably bounded group. The GN1 individual from Goyet shows nothing of the sort. Her proportion of genome contained in homozygous tracts is comparable to Vindija 33.19, not to the Chagyrskaya or Denisova 5 individuals. No excess of long tracts. No evidence of recent inbreeding. Whatever social dynamics shaped the Altai groups, they were not universal to the species.
The Goyet assemblage is worth pausing on. The remains recovered there — eventually assigned to at least six individuals — are highly fragmented, and many bear cut marks and percussion damage. An analysis published in 2016 interpreted these as evidence of cannibalism: defleshing, marrow extraction, bone use as tools. The individuals were processed like prey.
The new genetic data adds a strange dimension to this. Among the nine Goyet specimens sequenced, the researchers identified two clusters of genetically identical fragments, three bones each, representing two individuals (GN1 and GN2). One cluster had been wrongly refitted across two different tibias in the original skeletal analysis; only DNA comparison revealed the error. Beyond those within-individual matches, however, none of the Goyet Neanderthals appear to be close relatives of each other. No parent-offspring pairs. No siblings. A neonate is present among them, but his mother is not represented among the sampled females.
Whether the Goyet assemblage represents a single community or accumulated over time is genuinely unclear, and the researchers are appropriately cautious about inferring group structure from it. But the absence of close kin is notable. Isotopic evidence adds another layer: sulfur isotope values suggest local foraging at Spy but non-local origins at Goyet. Whoever those individuals were to each other, they were not a family, and at least some of them came from somewhere else.
Contrast that with Spy Cave, roughly thirty kilometers away, where the anatomical articulation of some skeletal elements has been interpreted as evidence of deliberate burial — though that reading remains contested. Genetically, the Spy individual, whose upper molar and femur turned out to belong to the same adult male (confirmed through nuclear DNA comparison), belongs to the same broad regional population as the Goyet individuals. Two sites, similar genetics, radically different treatment of the dead.
A ghost in the mitochondrial tree
The simplest story about late H. neanderthalensis in western Europe is that they formed a single, broadly connected population in their final millennia. The new data largely support that story, but with notable exceptions.
A molar recovered from Couvin, Belgium carries a mitochondrial genome that falls not within the main late Neanderthal clade but in a deeply divergent lineage shared with a Neanderthal called “Thorin” from Grotte Mandrin in the Rhône Valley of France. The divergence between this lineage and the mainstream late Neanderthal mtDNA is estimated tens of thousands of years deeper than the splits within the main clade. This is a lineage that predates the main radiation of late Neanderthals and apparently persisted alongside them in western Europe — possibly including other individuals known from Gibraltar and Poland.
The radiocarbon dating for Couvin places the individual at roughly 49,000 to 44,000 years ago, and the molecular dating shifts accordingly when anchored to those dates. But when the molecular clock runs unconstrained, it pushes the estimate past 100,000 years — a discrepancy similar to what has been reported for Thorin. The archaeological context argues against the Couvin tooth being an intrusion from an older deposit, and the researchers consider this unlikely. What seems more plausible is that a divergent maternal lineage, ancient in origin, was more widespread in western Europe than previously recognized and coexisted with other late Neanderthal lineages until close to the end.
The Arcy-sur-Cure individual (AR-30) from northeastern France adds a separate complication. Her nuclear genome suggests a population split from Vindija 33.19 around 131,000 years ago — much earlier than the other Belgian and French individuals, whose splits cluster around 54,000 years. The team explored possible explanations: faunal contamination (ruled out by metagenomic screening), modern human contamination (too low to account for the signal), or gene flow from a deeper Neanderthal lineage into AR-30’s ancestry. No firm conclusion is possible from the current data. More sequence coverage would help.
No accumulation of genetic damage
One influential hypothesis for H. neanderthalensis extinction holds that small, isolated populations were gradually worn down by the accumulation of mildly deleterious mutations — genetic load accumulation, a process documented in woolly mammoths and eastern gorillas. If Neanderthals were dying by genomic attrition, you would expect to see increasing proportions of harmful variants in later individuals compared with earlier ones.
The new data do not show that. Comparing early and late Neanderthals using three separate measures of genetic load — the ratio of missense to synonymous variants, a measure of functional constraint using polyPhen2, and a conservation score called phyloP — the team finds no significant difference across time. Neanderthals as a whole carry a depletion of non-synonymous variants relative to neutral expectation, meaning purifying selection was operating, but there is no trend toward deterioration. Homozygosity is not increasing. Heterozygosity is not decreasing.
This does not rule out other contributors to extinction. The Meuse Basin Neanderthals lived contemporaneously, at least by some estimates, with early Homo sapiens who were present in central Europe by around 47,000 years ago. Despite that temporal overlap, none of the 16 late Neanderthal genomes analyzed to date — including all those in this study — show any evidence of recent modern human ancestry. Putative modern human DNA segments identified in a handful of individuals are all short and lack the fixed diagnostic differences expected from recent introgression. They are consistent with much older gene flow or simply incomplete lineage sorting.
The asymmetry is striking. Every ancient H. sapiens genome from Eurasia predating 40,000 years ago that has been sequenced carries Neanderthal ancestry. Four of those individuals have Neanderthal ancestors only 4 to 10 generations back. The Neanderthal-to-modern-human flow happened, clearly and repeatedly. The modern-human-to-Neanderthal flow, if it occurred at all in these western European populations, left no detectable trace. The team suggests this asymmetry may reflect the demographics of expansion: when modern humans moved into Eurasia, they encountered Neanderthal groups and introgressed, and their descendants carried that ancestry everywhere. Neanderthal populations, more geographically stable and more widespread at the time of contact, would have absorbed any admixture only locally — and in a declining population, that signal can disappear.
What the genetics suggest about the cause of H. neanderthalensis disappearance is, ultimately, something like the absence of evidence rather than evidence of absence. The western European groups were not collapsing inward. They were not accumulating damage. They were a functioning, connected, genetically diverse regional population — right up until they weren’t.
Further Reading
* Skov, L. et al. Genetic insights into the social organization of Neanderthals. Nature 610, 519–525 (2022).
* Slimak, L. et al. Long genetic and social isolation in Neanderthals before their extinction. Cell Genomics 4, 100593 (2024).
* Prüfer, K. et al. A high-coverage Neandertal genome from Vindija Cave in Croatia. Science 358, 655–658 (2017).
* Rougier, H. et al. Neandertal cannibalism and Neandertal bones used as tools in Northern Europe. Scientific Reports 6, 29005 (2016).
* Wißing, C. et al. Stable isotopes reveal patterns of diet and mobility in the last Neandertals and first modern humans in Europe. Scientific Reports 9, 4433 (2019).
* Fu, Q. et al. An early modern human from Romania with a recent Neanderthal ancestor. Nature 524, 216–219 (2015).
* Hajdinjak, M. et al. Initial Upper Palaeolithic humans in Europe had recent Neanderthal ancestry. Nature 592, 253–257 (2021).


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