HistoryExtra https://www.historyextra.com/period/prehistoric Tue, 13 Oct 2026 19:15:57 GMT en hourly 1 This Iron Age woman had her brain scooped out. Why? https://www.historyextra.com/period/iron-age/scotland-brain-removal-research/ Tue, 13 Oct 2026 19:15:57 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/period/iron-age/scotland-brain-removal-research/ Why would our Iron Age forebears smash craniums and sharpen bones? A forensic archaeological study suggests these were acts of respect Iron Age people living in Scotland removed the brains of their dead and turned human bones into tools, research published in the journal Antiquity has found, providing evidence of complex and previously unknown funeral traditions thousands of years ago.
The findings became apparent after bones were uncovered at a site next to a loch in the far north-west of Scotland. They give a fascinating glimpse not just into how Iron Age people appeared to treat the dead with respect, but also how people migrated around the region. One expert has called it “a wonderful story of a cold-case piece of forensic archaeology” that could help change our understanding of the British Iron Age, roughly between 800BC and 43AD.
The research was carried out on two skeletons, one an adult female and the other a young male, discovered in a stone cairn near Loch Borralie. The area, with its sandy ground and relatively few streams, perfectly preserves bones like these and ensures they are not easily eroded.
A skull with a story to tell
When lead researcher Laura Castells Navarro, from the University of York, opened the box that stored the skeletons, she knew she was looking at something unusual. Firstly, the cranium on the female skeleton appeared to have been fractured after death in a deliberate manner. And if that was not strange enough, once Castells Navarro looked inside the front of the skull, there were clear markings – also apparently man-made. “Those markings, they just made absolutely no sense,” she says. “They’re just way too parallel, too sharp, way too evenly spaced – that just does not look like a natural process.”
After the researchers ruled out other causes for the markings, such as rodents, there could be only one conclusion: not long after the woman had died, her cranium had been smashed and her brain scraped out. But that was not all. Unusually, her long bones – the humerus, ulna and femur – appeared to taper off towards the end. Osteological examination found that this had been done on purpose: the bones had been whittled into sharp points, most probably very soon after her death.
But this was not done out of disrespect. In fact, perhaps the opposite.
An act of care
“One of the theories that we have been trying to really counteract when you find partial remains or have manipulated remains is that these people are the enemy, these are people that were not loved, that these are people outside of the society,” Castells Navarro says. “Sometimes, the level of burial is such that they have been just thrown into pits, basically. But in this case, they had been put into the grave with care, with a lot of knowledge and with a lot of sensitivity. It’s not an act of disrespect; it’s a careful act.”
Such care suggests that the woman commanded a level of respect and reverence within her society, Castells Navarro adds.
A previous study from 2016, focusing on the Danebury hill fort in Hampshire, found that Iron Age Britons had three distinct rites for the dead. One involved burying bodies and exhuming them years later to remove bones, perhaps as relics. Another would see bodies buried in deep pits, then body parts removed and deposited elsewhere. And a third would see bodies left exposed to the elements.
But the suggestion of rituals of respect involving manipulating the body, as in Loch Borralie, is new.
Family ties across ancient Scotland
Another key finding at the site came from DNA and isotope analysis of the skeletons, which involves measuring the prevalence of certain chemicals within the body.
The analysis concluded that the two people were closely related to each other – most probably maternal second cousins – suggesting they had travelled together. It also indicated that they had grown up about 80km south-east of Loch Borralie, and that they had genetic connections with people from Orkney, the islands some 175km north-east of the site, and Applecross, about 225km south-west.
This all paints a picture of a people who were not simply confined to their communities, but were instead highly mobile, intrepid and carried their cultural traditions with them over distances.
- Read more | Living with the dead? You need to know these 7 gruesome facts about the history of human burial
“This research challenges notions that everyone had ‘settled down’ in the Iron Age, and were born, brought up and died locally,” says Dr Melanie Giles, a professor of European history at the University of Manchester, who was not involved in the research. “Whatever prompted their move, they must have been bold, and no doubt they brought new stories and ideas with them, clearly settling in amongst local families.”
Castells Navarro says the discoveries are “absolutely fascinating” in the way they shed light on people who would have looked very much like us, but whose practices, and relationship with the dead, were very different. “It does give you this kind of tiny glimpse into something that is very close and at the same time is just very, very far,” she says.
“This is a wonderful story of a cold-case piece of forensic archaeology,” says Giles. “It’s a level of intimate detail relating to relationships and mobility we are only beginning to explore. It might shock us today but these Iron Age death-workers were the equivalent of our own funeral practitioners, taking care of the messy but necessary care for the body.”
]]> Are these the world’s oldest cities? Inside the megasites that Soviet authorities didn’t want you to see https://www.historyextra.com/membership/are-these-the-worlds-oldest-cities-inside-the-megasites-that-soviet-authorities-didnt-want-you-to-see/ Sun, 11 Oct 2026 15:00:04 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/are-these-the-worlds-oldest-cities-inside-the-megasites-that-soviet-authorities-didnt-want-you-to-see/ Hilary Mitchell introduces the Cucuteni-Trypillia, archaeological megasites that rival Uruk and Çatalhöyük for the accolade of ‘world’s oldest city’, knowledge of which was suppressed by the Soviet Union for decades. But why? If you were taking a quiz and were asked what the ‘world’s oldest city’ is, you’d probably get a point for answering Uruk, the ancient metropolis in what is now Iraq. It’s thought that this famous site, renowned for its monumental architecture, administrative sophistication and early use of writing, may have had an impressive 40,000 residents by its final phase in 3100 BC.
At that time, Uruk was home to people who didn’t have to sully their noble hands by farming. They were true urbanites who obtained their food from the surrounding hinterland – one of the features that many archaeologists consider to be an essential characteristic of a city.
Another site, Çatalhöyük in modern-day Turkey, also has a claim to the title of ‘world’s oldest city’, though it would appear quite strange to modern eyes: a streetless mass of houses clustered back-to-back with roof access into the buildings. Founded in around 7100 BC and abandoned in 5700 BC, it was certainly a significant and long-lasting settlement, as was Jericho in Palestine.
Archaeologists have unearthed the remains of more than 20 successive settlements in Jericho, the first of which dates back 11,000 years to 9000 BC. By 7370 BC, Jericho was a well-established town of small, round mud brick houses surrounded by a 12-foot-high stone wall with a defensive tower. UNESCO describes Jericho as the “oldest fortified city in the world.”
The existence of these famous and extremely well-documented sites gave rise to the belief that the first cities emerged in Mesopotamia, and that the area was, essentially, the cradle of urban civilisation.
However, recent research has challenged that long-held assumption.
Are these really the world’s oldest cities?
Around 6,500 years ago, an enigmatic society flourished across the forest-steppe expanse of present-day Ukraine, Moldova and Romania.
Known as the Cucuteni-Trypillia culture, or – more poetically – as “the last great Chalcolithic civilization of Europe,” (Mantu et al., 1997) its people constructed vast settlements that more than rival – in both size and organisation – the other proto-cities mentioned above.
The largest Cucuteni-Trypillia megasite is Talianki in Ukraine, which covered an area of around 450 hectares and is thought to have housed up to 21,000 inhabitants. Other significant megasites include Maidanetske (250 hectares/17,500 inhabitants), Dobrovody (250 hectares/16,200 inhabitants) and Nebelivka (275 hectares/15,000 inhabitants).
Megasites like Talianki weren’t just a random agglomeration of buildings: they appear to have been as meticulously planned out as any mass-produced postwar British suburb, with rows of houses radiating in concentric circles around a central open area, which may have been a space for community gatherings, perhaps fulfilling a similar purpose to a Roman forum.
The discovery of the Cucuteni-Trypillia megasites
In the 1960s, Russian military topographer Konstantin Shishkin was examining some aerial photographs of Ukraine when he noticed unusual shadows materialising on the ground in the vicinity of Kyiv. He saw ghostly rings in the soil, caused by differences in plant growth due to buried archaeological remains. In total, Shishkin identified what looked to be more than 250 examples of these strange shadows – all of them eerie traces of long-vanished structures.
Subsequent excavations and research confirmed that these communities represented some of the earliest examples of large-scale, low-density urban planning. And while Mesopotamian cities such as Uruk were celebrated for their temples and palaces, these sites tell a different story.
For more than 2,000 years, the Cucuteni-Trypillia culture made pots, hunted and gathered, farmed, and lived in huge settlements where all the houses were almost exactly the same size.
There were no signs of palaces, monumental tombs, or, in fact, graves of any kind. No one knows what these people did with their dead, which makes it harder to construct a clear picture of their religious beliefs or rituals.
But the lack of grave goods for most of the culture’s history may itself shed some light on the society’s world view. Instead of being buried with their owners, metal objects may have – more practically – been melted down and reused.
All houses were roughly five metres wide and up to 14 metres long. Constructed of wood and clay and resembling modern half-timbered buildings, they showed a striking degree of standardisation. “The architecture is reminiscent of Lego,” observed archaeologist Johannes Müller of Kiel University in Germany, who has studied the sites extensively since 2011.
This equality and uniformity piqued the interest of Soviet authorities at the time, who saw in these sites an almost perfect example of an idealised past: a truly classless society in line with Marxist ideology. Speaking to the BBC in 2021, Mykhailo Videiko, an archaeologist at Borys Grinchenko Kyiv Metropolitan University in Ukraine, explained why the authorities later went out of their way to suppress further scientific research and cover up the discovery.
It was thought that “Trypillia was a wonderful illustration of a pre-class, classless society or primitive communism,” said Videiko.
“As archaeologists are digging more, they start discovering megasites of Trypillia civilisation. They start finding all these huge buildings. And the question arises: Could this all be done by a classless society?” he added. Some interpreted the large structures, some over 700 square metres in size, as temples. Others thought they were more likely to be storehouses for grain.
Whatever they were, they didn’t align with the authorities’ vision of an ancient, social hierarchy-free Marxist utopia, so they cracked down on the project. Some archaeologists were convicted as being members of a terrorist spy organisation; others fled the country.
Books that furthered the study of Trypillia were published elsewhere but, Videiko explained: “Those books never reached Ukraine. They were researching something but almost no one here knew about it. Those who knew, remained silent.”
The renaissance of Cucuteni-Trypillia research
In the mid-1990s, archaeologist Roland Fletcher drew global attention to an overlooked prehistoric phenomenon: vast Neolithic-Chalcolithic settlements in Eastern Europe that appeared to defy the usual constraints of early agricultural communities.
His 1995 book The Limits of Settlement Growth describes the Cucuteni-Trypillia megasites as the sole known exception to his global model for the way in which all early settlements were limited in size and complexity.
Fletcher’s analysis highlighted a critical point: the enormous scale of these sites, some covering hundreds of hectares, would have made it virtually impossible for all inhabitants to remain in regular, face-to-face contact. This suggested either a sophisticated level of internal organisation, perhaps with designated areas, or possibly an early form of writing that aided communication.
A major step forward came in 2009, when a collaborative research team from Frankfurt and Kiel universities launched a comprehensive study of several key Cucuteni-Trypillia sites. These included Nebelivka, Talianki, Maidanetske and Dobrovody, among the most prominent mega-settlements, as well as the smaller site of Apolianka.
This ambitious project, detailed in a 2014 issue of the European Journal of Archaeology, employed cutting-edge geophysical methods to investigate the sites more thoroughly than ever before using more advanced magnetic gradiometry.
The Frankfurt-Kiel team were able to confirm that these settlements were laid out in concentric circles, suggesting an impressive degree of organisation. This suggests that all of the structures were carefully planned out before any construction began, strengthening the case that Talianki and similar megasites deserve to be called the oldest cities in history.
University of Kiel archaeologist Johannes Müller has put his cards on the table and confirmed that he considers them to be cities, saying: “When I started researching the Tripillia sites in 2012, I never thought I would call them ‘cities’.” Müller continued that now “that is beyond question for me. A city requires a concept. And here, planning is evident from the very beginning.”
“The decisive factor for me is not that they are huge settlements, but that you no longer know the people who live 1.5 kilometers away in the same settlement,” he added.
Why did the Cucuteni-Trypillia culture burn their houses?
The Frankfurt-Kiel team’s research also confirmed a particularly baffling element of the megasite mystery: the fate of the ‘Lego’ houses themselves. Many appear to have been deliberately burned, often every 60 to 80 years, leaving behind squares of ash containing magnetic oxides.
Some researchers suggest the burnings had a symbolic or ritual motive, perhaps linked to death or rebirth. Others think they served a more pragmatic purpose: perhaps hardening clay walls or clearing land for rebuilding.
Mirjana Stevanovic, an archaeologist from Serbia, has argued that the structures inside the burned house horizon “were destroyed by deliberate burning and most likely for reasons of a symbolic nature.” A Trypillia scholar, Vikentiy Khvoyka, believes that the houses were burned down when their inhabitants passed away, turning them from dwellings of the living into what he called “homes of the dead.”
However, Russian archaeologist Evgeniy Yuryevich Krichevski had a different take on the practice. He thought that the inhabitants weren’t destroying their homes, just reinforcing them. He believed that the heat of the flames would have hardened the clay walls into a ceramic surface, while the smoke would have fumigated the living space.
In 2018, a team of Ukrainian and British archaeologists decided to put this theory to the test.
They recreated two Cucuteni-Trypillia type houses, building them from scratch from the same clay and wood materials used thousands of years ago. Although wooden elements such as the roof were destroyed, the team found that the walls of both buildings were left intact, along with various clay items and ritual items the researchers had placed inside.
What artefacts are associated with the Cucuteni-Trypillia people?
Wherever Cucuteni-Trypillia people lived, archaeologists have found stylised, small female figurines, with distinctive geometric designs on their curvy bodies.
In the 1970s, Lithuanian archaeologist Marija Gimbutas, working at UCLA, California, published several influential books suggesting that the female figures were goddesses, and that the Cucuteni-Trypillia people, along with other early societies of ‘Old Europe’, were led by women – though these days, Gimbutas’s work is considered to be highly speculative.
However, whether it points to a wide-reaching, goddess-worshipping matriarchal culture or not, the material legacy of the Cucuteni-Trypillia culture is deeply compelling. Cucuteni–Trypillia pottery in particular – yellow-hued and decorated in stunning swirling patterns and vibrant colours – speaks of a deeply sophisticated artistic tradition.
Archaeologist Mykhailo Videiko has explained that the people of Trypillia “managed to implement almost all technological innovations of their time,” using kilns that were very advanced for that period.
In an attempt to raise awareness about the extraordinary craftsmanship of her ancestors, in 2021, Ukrainian fashion designer Svitlana Bevza created a line of Trypillia-influenced clothing and jewellery as a way of celebrating this – as the Frankfurt-Kiel team put it – “persistently overlooked” ancient civilisation.
Bevza told the BBC she found it unjust that “this great culture is not that well-known in the world, as Egyptian, for instance. There was no voice to the world who could talk about this culture.”
In the five years since she created her evocative collection, more light has been shed on these extraordinary settlements, and they are finally beginning to get the recognition they deserve.
In a field where terminology is often debated and definitions evolve, one thing is becoming clearer: the Cucuteni-Trypillia culture – once viewed as peripheral to early urban development – is now rightfully taking centre stage in our understanding of how cities first emerged.
]]> These Iron Age bodies were all buried in the same bizarre way. What does it mean? https://www.historyextra.com/membership/iron-age-burials-gaul-ritual-cultural-belief/ Thu, 06 Aug 2026 14:53:15 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/iron-age-burials-gaul-ritual-cultural-belief/ The excavation of a 2,000 year old burial site revealed eighteen skeletons buried upright, and archaeologists have a few theories about why Archaeologists tend to spend a lot of time with the dead. But occasionally, an ancient burial they unearth surprises even them.
This was the case during recent excavations at a site near Dijon in France. At a settlement from Iron Age Gaul, dating to between 2,400 and 2,000 years old, a team from the French National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research (INRAP) found the skeletal remains of at least 18 bodies, each buried sitting upright.
Seated burials are almost unheard of today, and they were equally rare in the past.
Previous research has uncovered just a few dozen seated burials from the entire Iron Age of ancient Gaul – an area covering most of modern France and some neighbouring countries. This makes the 18 or so seated burials discovered near Dijon a significant find, and hints that the ancient site was a particularly important one.
“Where we find larger numbers of seated burials, we usually find a temple nearby,” says archaeologist Andrew Lamb at the University of Edinburgh, who wasn’t involved in the excavations but discussed them with HistoryExtra. “I wouldn’t be surprised if they find something big like a temple in the vicinity of the Dijon site, if it has survived.”
The Dijon finds are yet to be formally published, but in a statement issued earlier this year the INRAP team sketched out their initial findings. All of the dead had been buried in a similar manner, with each body placed at the bottom of a metre-wide circular pit and positioned to face west. All appear to have been adult men, between 40 and 60 years of age, and the skeletons suggest all had enjoyed good health during their lives. Five or six of the skeletons show signs of injuries that hadn’t healed before death, possibly indicating at least some of the men might have been intentionally killed shortly before burial.
- Read more | A brief guide to the British Iron Age
None of this explains exactly why the bodies were buried in a seated position, facing west, and the INRAP researchers didn’t speculate on the subject in their press statement. But previously published research might help us understand the puzzle that these mysterious burials present.
Did seated burials have special significance?
All burials from the European Iron Age are significant, regardless of the orientation of the body in the ground. This is because archaeologists think that most people in Europe were cremated at this point in history. “If you take Ireland during the Iron Age, you have maybe just 0.5 per cent of the population turning up in the burial record,” says Lamb.
This rarity of burials isn’t unique to Iron Age Europe.
Although the practice is popular today, burial has been the exception rather than the rule since it emerged as a human funerary rite about 130,000 years ago. The relatively few bodies that were committed to the ground feature prominently in our thinking about the past. But this is largely because buried bodies have a good chance of long-term survival, making them easier for archaeologists to find. Other funerary rites must have been available but many may have involved the rapid destruction of the body, which makes them far less archaeologically visible.
“Every now and again, you see a paper published about the missing dead, about this idea that remains were treated in different ways that we just don’t see,” says Tom Booth, an archaeologist at University College London, speaking to HistoryExtra. “It can give you a bit of vertigo because you suddenly get a sense of the depth of what we are missing.”
The reluctance to bury bodies isn’t difficult to understand. In earlier times – especially before the development of agriculture – population densities were low. “Why would you decide to dig a hole when there was plenty of open space where you could just place the body?” says Booth. “Digging a hole is not the most practical approach.”
If burying a body isn’t practical, choosing to place a body in a seated position within the grave is even less so. That makes these Iron Age burials even more of a mystery. “It’s very difficult to keep a body in that position, especially because we’ve evolved to be top-heavy with a big cranium,” says Lamb. “Bodies will fall forwards, or they will slip to the side.”
Why, then, did Iron Age Europeans take on such an impractical and challenging task? As is often the case in archaeology, there are no clear answers. But there are clues.
For instance, the archaeological evidence shows that at least some Iron Age seated burials were committed to the ground during festivals that must have involved most of the community. The best evidence of this comes from the site of Acy-Romance, which lies a few hundred kilometres to the north of Dijon. Here, at an ancient temple complex, archaeologists have unearthed 19 seated burials. Their research suggests the bodies belonged to sacrificial victims killed during a midwinter festival. Each body was then taken inside the temple and placed in a small wooden box, in which it was compressed into a contorted sitting position and left to naturally mummify for the rest of the winter. Finally, the mummified seated body was interred in a pit near the temple.
- Read more | For decades, this prehistoric grave was a mystery. Have its dark secrets now been revealed?
Such elaborate treatment of the dead was clearly linked to cultural belief, says Booth. One suggestion is that some Iron Age communities saw seated burials as symbolic conduits for communication between the living and the dead, perhaps explaining why they were placed in a seated position – a pose associated with the living. Three seated burials at the site of Reviers in northern France potentially fit with this idea. All three were buried facing towards a nearby river, and rivers were important routes of communication during the Iron Age.
But this ritualistic explanation doesn’t necessarily apply to all Iron Age seated burials, or to seated burials from other periods. “You get them occasionally distributed over the last 5,000 years or so, and I think it’s a mistake to think they are all linked in some way,” says Booth.
Why are we so fascinated by Iron Age seated burials?
Ancient burials offer evidence of how vanished communities responded to death. “I think they speak to something deep, trying to get inside the heads of people who lived in the past,” says Lamb.
But this doesn’t necessarily mean we find all ancient burials – or even all seated burials – equally fascinating. For instance, in 2013, archaeologists published a study on the early farmers buried at Tell Halula, a 10,000-year-old Neolithic settlement located in Syria. All of these early farmers were wrapped in shrouds and buried in seated positions. The research received almost no media attention.
Lamb thinks that the broader context may help explain why the seated burials near Dijon fascinate modern audiences. “The Iron Age is really quite close to our modern time. People may identify with the Iron Age in a way they don’t with the Neolithic,” he says. For people of European descent, Iron Age Europeans may even feel like members of the family and discovering that they deliberately propped up their dead in the grave might feel a little unsettling, says Lamb.
But this discomfort arguably tells us as much about modern sensibilities as it does about Iron Age communities. In modern western cultures, very few people interact with dead bodies, and the idea of manipulating the dead into a particular pose might seem distasteful or disturbing. “Death today has become sanitised and professionalised, and it’s something many of us encounter infrequently,” says Lamb.
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]]> An ancient mystery is hiding under one of Scotland's major archaeological sites – and it's about to be dug up https://www.historyextra.com/period/stone-age/ness-of-brodgar-new-excavation-update-mystery/ Wed, 01 Jul 2026 16:15:45 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/period/stone-age/ness-of-brodgar-new-excavation-update-mystery/ The Ness of Brodgar was covered over in 2024 to preserve it for future generations. But a new discovery at the edge of the site has brought archaeologists back already The archaeological team had gathered, as they often did at the end of a day’s work, at the pub. In front of them on their table at the Ferry Inn in Stromness, the second-largest town in Scotland's Orkney archipelago, a laptop was open.
Hours earlier, they had been about five miles to the north-east at the Ness of Brodgar. This network of Neolithic (late Stone Age) buildings on a patch of land between two lochs is widely acknowledged as one of Britain’s, if not the world’s, most important prehistoric sites.
Over two days, the group, from the online archaeological show Time Team, had been slowly driving a quad bike, pulling what appeared to be a large tray over a grassy part of the Ness. It had not been mapped in detail before, and the tray was in fact a powerful ground-penetrating radar that would give them a full 3D image, made up of billions of data points, showing what lay beneath.
John Gater, a Time Team geophysicist for whom the Ness of Brodgar has been his life’s work and passion, was one of those in the pub analysing the finds on the laptop.
His colleagues already knew the results, and he had not realised that they had placed a small piece of black tape over a corner of the computer. Then they removed it, and revealed the surprise.
“I suddenly saw these results,” Gater says, and pauses. “I was quite emotional about it. That sounds over the top, but my mind was racing: ‘What have we mapped?’” Naturally, the team celebrated with a few drams of whisky.
The scans showed what has, somewhat quaintly, been called an “anomaly” – a shape buried on the edge of the Ness that was not previously known. It may end up being more than just an anomaly, however. Depending on what a dig beginning in the next few weeks shows, it could upend the narrative of the Ness of Brodgar.
The ‘anomaly’ that could rewrite the Ness story
For centuries, up to the early 2000s, no one had taken much notice of a mound of earth at the isthmus where the Ness is located. It had always appeared to be just that: an indistinct bump, albeit one in proximity to two important stone circles – the Ring of Brodgar, which dates back to the third millennium BC, and the Stones of Stenness, which, at about 5,000 years old, is probably the oldest henge in Britain.
That bump held its own secrets, however, as an archaeological survey revealed in 2002. It showed evidence of a dense cluster of structures under the ground, and further digs starting in 2004 eventually revealed the remains of close to 40 buildings.
At its heyday, the site would have been impressively tall and complex, layered with tiled roofs, coloured walls and decorated stone, suggesting it held a sense of importance to the community going back millennia.
Archaeologist Nick Card, of the University of the Highlands and Islands, has worked on the site since those early days and will be involved in this summer’s dig. His enthusiasm for the Ness of Brodgar shines through from the moment he begins talking about it.
“The Ness has transformed our understanding of many different aspects of the Neolithic in Orkney, and further afield,” he says. “It is a place where the evidence transforms our picture of social life and social change in the Neolithic, and the nature of contact and communication at broader scales.”
Why the site was covered over
But Card’s work on the Ness always had an end point, or at least a pause point. Exposing the fragile structures to the fierce elements at this meeting point of the North Sea and the Atlantic Ocean brought the risk of erosion and so, in 2024, a perhaps surprising decision was taken: the main site was covered over again. Doing so also allowed the archaeological teams to analyse and write up everything they had discovered over two decades.
“One of the reasons we covered it over was for it to be locked there for future generations, with better techniques, better technology and better science to actually deal with it in future,” Card says.
But even as the site was being covered up, there was still a sense among those who worked there that plenty more lay undiscovered. Time Team offered to fund the 3D scan of an adjoining section of the site measuring roughly 14 metres by 12. Now broadcast exclusively on YouTube since leaving Channel 4 in 2013, the programme has hundreds of thousands of subscribers, whose contributions will also fund this summer’s work.
Over four weeks, the team of up to a dozen archaeologists will remove a layer of top soil, before digging a small trench through the site, which will be excavated in sections, down to about half a metre.
“When we closed the site up in 2024, we always said: ‘That’s it, never go back, no more digging’,” says Card. “But the nature of this anomaly, we think, could add another chapter to the Ness.”
Caution before a new excavation
What exactly that chapter could be is a matter of some secrecy and caution. Everyone seems to agree that what lies under the ground is not likely to pre-date the previous Neolithic discoveries at the Ness, but it certainly is unusual.
“What’s different is we’re no longer seeing these rectilinear shapes, these large Neolithic buildings,” says John Gater. “We’re seeing something that is totally different that hasn’t been seen before on the Ness. It’s the sort of response that, although it looks very clear on the radar, there’s lots of different explanations.”
If it is indeed later than the Neolithic period, the new structure could suggest a continued occupation of the site that had not been previously known, and hint at an appreciation of the site’s significance that continued across centuries.
But that’s as much as anyone is willing to discuss – due partly to a natural caution held by archaeologists and geophysicists who don’t wish to speak too soon, and due partly to an eagerness not to reveal more before new episodes of Time Team are broadcast.
The archaeological urge not to jump the gun is understandable. Gater says that once his team carried out scans on a site that might have contained Roman ruins. They were keeping an eye out for typically straight Roman lines underground, only for scans to pick up unusual curved features. Inevitably, they were excited by this surprising discovery.
“What we had was the white lines of an old football pitch,” he says. “Where they’d been putting down lime to mark the penalty area, and so on. It had changed the moisture content of the soil.”
Even so, Gater says he is “nervously excited” about the work ahead on the site he has known for close to 50 years, and acknowledges it could lead to even further exploration.
“The rest of the landscape could be looked at, and that would be a 20-year project, I imagine,” he says. “I’ll probably be using my zimmer frame to get around, or a mobile scooter – and I could have the antenna attached to the back of that.”
]]> When did humans first reach the Americas? Scientists are still battling over the truth https://www.historyextra.com/membership/human-migration-into-americas-new-research-and-questions/ Sat, 25 Apr 2026 07:45:48 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/human-migration-into-americas-new-research-and-questions/ Research into when, how and why humans migrated into the American continents many thousands of years ago is challenging and contentious – and a recent study might have added to the complexity For decades, the story of the arrival of the first humans in the Americas – and the uncertainty around it – has been tied to one small site in the mountains of Chile: Monte Verde.
Before the discovery of Monte Verde 50 years ago, it had long been believed that the first humans reached the American continents from the far north, then travelled south through the Americas, about 13,000 years ago.
Remains found at Monte Verde overturned that conclusion.
Radiocarbon dating concluded that the evidence of human settlement there – wooden hut foundations, footprints and tools – were about 14,500 years old.
This upended the previous narrative, suggesting humans had arrived into the Americas much earlier than had been thought.
Now, a new development has twisted that narrative once more, adding to the mythology, and confusion, around Monte Verde – and the deep human past of the Americas. A controversial study published in the journal Science has concluded the remains were not, in fact, as old as had been thought – lending credence to the original theories all over again.
In many ways, the findings leave us less certain than before, and beg a fundamental question: why do we still not know for certain when humans first arrived in the Americas?
Human migration into the Americas
When looking back at the story of how humanity spread across the world, a few things are relatively certain. Homo sapiens first emerged in Africa, and seem to have successfully left the continent in significant numbers about 60,000 years ago. They migrated first to Asia and Oceania, and then Europe.
The question of when – and indeed how – our ancestors first made landfall in the Americas has always been much more open, however, despite the migration being much more recent.
Huge leaps forward in our understanding were made with discoveries in two locations in New Mexico in the early part of the last century. First, almost 100 years ago, excavations near the village of Folsom found the fluted tip of a spear was found between the ribs of an ancient bison believed to have lived about 12,500 years ago.
Then, in the 1930s, further similar spear tips were found near the city of Clovis, which were believed to be a few hundred years older than the previous find. From then on, the so-called Clovis people were believed to be among the first in the Americas, and the Clovis-first theory was born.
It therefore followed that the migration into the Americas must have taken place at the end of the last Ice Age, when a land bridge opened between Asia and North America, in an area named Beringia, where the Bering Strait is now located (and is now mostly underwater).
The Clovis-first theory held – until 1976, when Monte Verde entered the equation.
The discovery of Monte Verde
The site is located next to a creek in a mountainous, forested area near the town of Puerto Montt, some 500 miles south of Chile’s capital, Santiago. When logging in the 1970s led to land erosion in the area, its archaeological significance became clear.
Monte Verde had been home to hunter-gatherers, who left behind the remnants of plants, tools, spears, wood and other artefacts. They were found to pre-date Clovis, and the findings shook the archaeological world. If humans were this far south 14,500 years ago, when did they enter the Americas at the north? Or did they? Could they maybe have arrived by boat from the south instead?
Or maybe they weren’t that far south 14,500 years ago, after all.
That is the new theory put forward in the new Science study, which concludes that the remains are, at most, only 8,200 years old. “With colonization no longer anchored by Monte Verde, our revised chronology supports a more recent date of human arrival to South America,” the authors say.
They suggest that some of the items at Monte Verde, such as Ice Age wood, had been deposited there by the creek, contaminating the site and giving the impression it is older than it really is.
“It’s going to be a really interesting debate over the next few months and years,” one archaeologist not involved in the research told National Geographic. “It’ll be a firestorm.”
That firestorm has already taken hold, with some archaeological scientists disputing the validity of the story. One told LiveScience that the paper showed examples of “egregiously poor geological work” and dismissed the findings.
How the new research complicates the picture
So do we now know even less about the migration to the Americas than we used to?
For some of the experts in the field, the answer seems to be… maybe. For those who previously worked at Monte Verde, and are committed to its original dating, the answer is a clear “No”.
“I would say don’t put that much stock in the recent Monte Verde critique, as it is problematic on many levels,” says Professor David Meltzer, an archaeologist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, who led an expedition to the site in 1997.
The new research adds to the competing theories, and Meltzer knows the full picture may never emerge – even if he feels there is growing evidence of other pre-Clovis peoples across the Americas.
“We will never get a definitive answer, of course, for we will never find the very first Americans, or, if we did, recognise that we had,” he says.
“But we are homing in on the window in which it likely took place. That’s about the best we can hope for: an ever-narrowing window.”
Finding conclusive evidence of the first people in the Americas is unlikely for a number of reasons: their numbers were likely extremely small, and the continents are enormous. Any evidence would have to have been well preserved, too: it is only by chance that Monte Verde became caked in a layer of peat that helped protect it.
But just as the “when” may never be fully answered with near certainty, the “why” humans travelled to the Americas may too remain a mystery.
“To me it is a very interesting factor, but one that will be difficult to nail down,” says Meltzer. “It is hard enough to figure out motives with living humans and why they do what they do, but even tougher for people who lived so long ago and whose culture or cultures were so very different from our own. And for some it could be one thing, for others multiple factors.”
Writing in his book The Human Past, Meltzer suggests a few possible reasons for the migration: those humans may have been looking for more resources, or a better climate, for example.
“People seeking new lands did not have to be right about what they might find, in order to go looking for it,” he writes. But maybe, he says, there was another factor behind them arriving in the Americas, one that is mirrored in the ongoing discussions about Monte Verde: these humans may just have been curious, and enjoyed discovering something new.
]]> 40,000 years ago, our ancestors left these strange symbols behind. What do they really mean? https://www.historyextra.com/membership/40000-years-ago-ancestors-strange-symbols-what-do-they-mean/ Fri, 17 Apr 2026 13:13:28 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/40000-years-ago-ancestors-strange-symbols-what-do-they-mean/ Research has unveiled a 43,000-year-old system of symbols – but is it evidence of a forerunner of writing systems, or something altogether different? Writing is a tool for documenting ideas and events, and its invention transformed human history.
It’s widely accepted that this world-changing technology was invented independently in at least four places: Mesopotamia, Egypt, China and Mesoamerica. Of these four great centres of innovation, it was in Mesopotamia and Egypt that the technology first emerged. Both ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs and Mesopotamian cuneiform are roughly 5,200 years old.
Thanks to archaeology, it’s also possible to trace the technological innovations that preceded writing, eventually evolving into it. In Mesopotamia, about 9,500 years ago, traders were using small lumps of clay as numerical tokens to help calculate the value of goods. They soon began encapsulating these tokens in hollow clay balls, perhaps to signify trade transactions that were considered settled and permanent. These clay balls were opaque, so administrators made impressions on the outer surface to represent the tokens held inside.
An important third step occurred roughly 5,500 years ago, when traders dispensed entirely with the tokens and flattened out the clay balls. These were still marked with impressions representing the now-abandoned tokens, producing the first clay tablets bearing symbols – a clear forerunner of cuneiform: the world's oldest writing system, marked onto clay tablets.
All the steps in this technological journey took place within the past 10,000 years.
But in early 2026, one team of researchers made a striking claim. According to them, there is evidence that humans associated with the Aurignacian culture (which existed in Palaeolithic Europe between around 43,000 and 26,000 years ago) developed a system of signs and markings that shared features in common with a forerunner of cuneiform writing.
The announcement was interpreted by some as proof that the roots of writing are far older than had been thought – by an order of tens of thousands of years.
A Stone Age script?
Archaeologists have known for a century that the Aurignacians carved marks onto the surface of bones and small figurines. These marks include rows of dots or crosses. They were clearly intentionally made, but no one had taken the trouble to seriously analyse and interpret them, says Christian Bentz, a computational linguist at Saarland University in Germany.
He and his colleague, archaeologist Ewa Dutkiewicz at the Berlin State Museums in Germany, have now performed such an analysis. The two researchers focused in particular on the potential for the marks to encode information. Essentially, this involves measuring the degree of variety in a sequence of marks: a row of identical crosses has little potential to convey information, but a row containing different symbols could be information dense. This is why a string of alphabetic symbols (like this sentence, or any word) can convey a complex message.
Bentz and Dutkiewicz compared the marks on the Aurignacian objects to 5,500-year-old Mesopotamian inscriptions written using a forerunner of cuneiform known as proto-cuneiform. To their surprise, they discovered that both the Aurignacian markings and proto-cuneiform had a similar information-carrying potential.
“I couldn’t believe it,” says Bentz, speaking to HistoryExtra. “I thought I must have messed up the analysis somehow.” But even after checking and rechecking the results, the finding stood.
That comparison is sound, according to linguistic anthropologist Piers Kelly at the University of New England in Australia. But this isn’t because the Aurignacians had developed a Stone Age script; it’s because the proto-cuneiform inscriptions can hardly be considered writing at all.
Proto-cuneiform clearly resembles writing, particularly since it was produced using the tools – a stylus and clay tablet – we associate with Mesopotamian cuneiform. But the information it encodes is very basic, because the earliest versions of proto-cuneiform employed a very limited number of distinct signs, representing a restricted set of ideas.
Proto-cuneiform only developed a much richer “dictionary” of signs by about 5,200 years ago, and it was then that it had the potential to store more information. Indeed, Bentz and Dutkiewicz’s analysis confirms this, showing that later proto-cuneiform inscriptions have a far greater information-carrying potential than the Aurignacian marks.
“It can look as if there is a neat continuity between [the early and late proto-cuneiform inscriptions],” says Kelly, speaking to HistoryExtra. “But they are categorically different systems.” Cuneiform is writing, proto-cuneiform isn’t, says Kelly. He, and many other scholars, prefer not to label any of the proto-cuneiform inscriptions (even the later, richer proto-cuneiform examples) with the W-word.
Writing, says Kelly, is a system for encoding linguistic information – in simple terms, a tool for recording speech. This means writing involves assigning specific sound values to signs. Proto-cuneiform never did this.
Its sign for “sheep” – a cross inside a circle – tells us nothing about how ancient Mesopotamians voiced the word “sheep”.
In fact, it wasn’t until about 4,900 years ago that Mesopotamians began encoding speech with writing, repurposing signs to represent spoken syllables. This, according to Kelly, is when writing was actually invented in the region. “The various notational systems that preceded and influenced this innovation were simply part of the symbolic raw material that made writing possible,” he says.
In other words, the Aurignacian artefacts don’t necessarily show us that writing has roots stretching back 43,000 years. They only show us that humans were iteratively experimenting with the technologies that would allow for the invention of writing, tens of thousands of years later.
Searching for meaning in the Stone Age
But why were humans experimenting with signs 43,000 years ago?
“It is generally accepted that the signs have a communication function,” says archaeologist April Nowell at the University of Victoria in Canada, speaking to HistoryExtra about the research. “We have known for a long time that they are not random.”
However, not everyone is convinced by this idea.
Archaeologist Silvia Ferrara at the University of Bologna in Italy and her colleagues recently published an analysis of even older marks, these produced by members of our species in southern Africa roughly 65,000 years ago. The marks in question include parallel lines or crosshatched grids, carefully scratched into the surface of ostrich eggshell fragments.
Speaking to HistoryExtra, Ferrara says the analysis deliberately avoided making any assumptions about the purpose of those marks, instead merely exploring the cognitive behaviours that allowed humans to produce them in the first place. “Writing was not part of the picture,” she says. The suggestion is that humans began intentionally producing marks on objects long before they began assigning any communicative meaning to those marks.
Predictably, these ideas complicate our understanding of the Aurignacian marks.
While Bentz and Dutkiewicz showed they had the potential to store information, that doesn’t mean they actually did. “I’m not convinced they have the same kind of information content as the proto-cuneiform signs, for which we can often assign definite meanings,” says computational linguist Richard Sproat at Sakana.ai in Japan, commenting on the research to HistoryExtra.
And, there is one more factor to consider, says Kelly.
From our modern perspective, writing often serves as a substitute for speech, conveying every detail of a message. But non-writing sign systems are more complex. For instance, indigenous Australians have long made use of a communication device known as the message stick – typically a length of wood engraved with a series of marks. But, says Kelly, the message stick is just one element in the communication process. “Message stick communication is highly multimodal involving spoken language, gesture and body paint,” he says. “As such, message sticks can be thought of as an almost supplementary prop within a multi-channel communicative routine.” They cannot be understood in isolation.
This doesn’t mean that the Aurignacian artefacts, and the marks they carried, were part of a similarly elaborate multi-channel communication system. But it does serve as a reminder that we might be missing important context that could help us understand how – if at all – the artefacts helped convey a message.
“Anthropologists have always championed the importance of ‘being there’ as an active participant-observer in the communities they want to understand,” says Kelly. Because it’s impossible for archaeologists to “be there” with the Aurignacians, we may never work out how they used the artefacts they left behind.
]]> For decades, this prehistoric grave was a mystery. Have its dark secrets now been revealed? https://www.historyextra.com/membership/iron-age-burial-gomolava-news/ Fri, 20 Mar 2026 11:15:27 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/iron-age-burial-gomolava-news/ Devastating illness wiped out a community in Iron Age Serbia – or so it was thought. New research suggests the real story behind a large prehistoric burial site might be much darker As Europe progressed into the early Iron Age, it marked the beginning of a new chapter in prehistory.
The Iron Age in Europe began roughly around 900 BC, when iron tools and weapons began to replace those made from bronze. The transition brought technological change, accompanied by major shifts in social organisation.
Clan-based communities that had long relied on mixed economies of farming, herding and seasonal mobility began to organise themselves into static chiefdoms organised around powerful leaders. Settlements grew larger, and trade networks expanded across the continent, opening up new opportunities for cultural and economic exchange.
It was a change that created new ways of living – and new ways of dying, too.
- Read more | A brief guide to the British Iron Age
Across central and south-eastern Europe, landscapes appear to have been increasingly contested as communities vied for access to new trade routes and fertile land, clashing over opposing ideas, beliefs, territorial needs and resources. In some cases, these disputes descended into violent conflict.
Archaeological evidence from this period includes fortified hilltop settlements, weapon deposits and graves showing signs of trauma, all suggesting that warfare and organised violence were becoming more common in parts of Iron Age Europe.
The Carpathian Basin of south-eastern Europe – the vast region spanning parts of modern Hungary, Serbia, Croatia and Romania – forms a natural crossroads between central Europe, the Balkans and the eastern Mediterranean, making it an important corridor for trade, migration and cultural exchange during the prehistoric period. It was one of these dangerous zones of violent change.
It was in this region, in 1954, that archaeologists first uncovered a site called Gomolava along the banks of the Sava River in northern Serbia, which dates to the earliest years of the Iron Age, around 2,800 years ago.
Gomolava is a large archaeological mound known as a tell – a mound formed by centuries of repeated building in the same location. When archaeologists excavated the site in 1971, they found evidence of a mass burial that dated to this early Iron Age period of flux.
New bioarchaeological research conducted on the human remains has revealed a plethora of unsettling mysteries.
The mysterious mass grave at Gomolava
Inside the burial – a shallow circular pit just three metres wide – were the remains of 77 humans.
The bodies had been carefully placed together, and more than half of them were children under the age of 12. The grave appeared to represent the aftermath of a catastrophe such as disease or famine – something that might explain the disproportionate number of the young. Mass burials in archaeological contexts are often initially interpreted as the result of epidemics, starvation events or natural disasters, particularly when many children are present.
But a new analysis of the skeletons, published in Nature Human Behaviour, paints a decidedly more disturbing picture.
A team led by archaeologists and bioarchaeologists from several European institutions re-examined the bones, which have been stored for decades at the Museum of Vojvodina in Novi Sad, Serbia. Their initial expectation was to confirm the original interpretation: that this was a community burial following an epidemic.
Instead, they found signs of extraordinary and calculated violence.
Roughly one in five individuals displayed clear trauma injuries, including fractured skulls, cuts made by bladed weapons and damage consistent with arrow strikes. Because many lethal injuries – particularly those affecting soft tissue, such as cuts to the throat – leave no marks on bone, the researchers believe the true number of victims who died violently was probably far higher. The team concluded that the entire group had likely been deliberately killed.
The first obvious question was: why?
Rather than offering answers, further genetic testing only deepened the mystery.
Apart from one mother buried with her two daughters, the individuals in the grave were not closely related to each other. Isotope analysis of their teeth – which preserves chemical signals from childhood diet and environment – revealed that many of them had grown up in different regions and eaten different kinds of food. The victims weren’t members of a single family group, or village. Instead, they appear to have come from multiple communities across a wider region – but they all died and were buried together in the same place.
The burial also contained personal ornaments including brooches, bracelets and rings, suggesting the bodies hadn’t been looted. Unexpected animal bones found within the grave also hint that the burial may have involved offerings or feasting rituals (animal remains placed alongside human burials are often interpreted by archaeologists as evidence of ritual activity connected with death and commemoration).
The final mystery offered by analysis of the mass burial was that this violence was targeted at women and girls.
In total, over 60 per cent of the victims were children and, more than 70 per cent were female.
The picture that the archaeologists were uncovering began to look like a deliberate, possibly ritualistic, mass killing of women and children originating from the wider region.
But what would that mean? And what, if anything, can it tell us about broader Iron Age societies? To begin answering these questions, it helps to place the findings within wider archaeological debates.
Speaking to HistoryExtra about the research, Professor Penny Bickle, an expert in funerary archaeology at the University of York, says that it’s important to resist looking for single, decisive answers. She situates the findings within a broader shift in how archaeologists understand violence in prehistory.
“In the past archaeologists have debated how violent prehistory was in depth, but had a tendency to treat violence as an either/or scenario. Either prehistory was totally peaceful and harmonious or violent and dangerous. Over recent years, as a discipline we've come to understand that this binary is not very helpful. Violence is present in all societies, and the interesting questions are: when and why did it take place, and who was it targeted at?”
Power, symbolism and the limits of the evidence
One possible way to interpret the evidence is through the lens of power and display.
The researchers themselves note that the victims in the burial were most likely deliberately selected. Instead of killing enemy warriors – the most immediate threat – the perpetrators targeted women and children: the people who, in a biological sense, would represent the future of their communities.
Professor Bickle confirms that this is certainly noteworthy. She points out how unusual the demographic profile of the burial is compared to other mass graves: “Often in cases of mass burial, young women are less well represented, but there are a mix of genders and age. The mass burial at Gomolava does stand out as the deliberate targeting of females.”
One interpretation of the killing of these people, then, could be that this was a carefully orchestrated public display of dominance and power by one group over other regional groups by the symbolic killing of their women and children.
The implication from whoever led the killing may have been: ‘during this period of change, we’re in charge’.
Adding to this idea is that the burial itself sits atop a prominent settlement mound that overlooks the surrounding landscape. It’s a visible landmark for all who were local to it. By placing the victims in this place, accompanied by animal offerings and valuable personal items, the people behind the killings could have been creating a highly visible statement of dominance over the present – and the future.
The act may have functioned in much the same way as the ritual destruction of weapons or treasure hoards found elsewhere in Bronze Age Europe. Across prehistoric Europe, archaeologists have discovered numerous hoards of deliberately buried weapons, tools and valuables, which are often interpreted as ritual deposits meant to display wealth, reinforce authority or communicate religious or political messages. In those cases, valuable objects were deliberately sacrificed to demonstrate authority and power. It’s an idea that there are echoes of in this mass burial – albeit with valuable humans being sacrificed, rather than valuable goods.
That’s one interpretation – and it might seem like the only interpretation that makes sense of all the various strands of evidence when put together. However, this interpretation is far from definitive. Experts argue that, sometimes, the attempt to extract grand conclusions from single sites is inherently problematic.
Professor Bickle stresses that such acts are often rooted in specific local circumstances rather than broad, universal patterns: “My sense is that these acts of violence are often bound up in local or regional events, rather than having an underpinning evolutionary development. While projects like this give us insight into how mass violence took place, they do not give us definitive answers as to why these events took place. This will take careful regional analysis of a broader range of archaeological and environmental data.”
Professor Howard Williams, an archaeologist at the University of Chester, is an expert on the study of death and burial. Speaking to HistoryExtra, he agrees on the importance of understanding the local context.
“I would emphasise the need for further fieldwork in the locality to help understand their relationship with contemporary mortuary practices and settlement patterns to help provide context. Exceptional mass graves hit the headlines, but we often lack the fine-grained understanding of the specific time and locality to extrapolate out to broader patterns of violence.”
In other words, without a deep understanding of that local context, the evidence presented by the new research arguably leaves more questions than answers.
The victims’ diverse origins suggest they may have been refugees, captives or displaced people moving through the region during a time of upheaval. They might have been intercepted by a rival group while journeying along the Sava River corridor.
Pointing to this ambiguity, Professor Williams highlights the range of plausible scenarios that still fit the evidence: “It isn’t clear to me we can rule out the wholesale massacre of one population who had themselves disparate origins, or hostages or captives brought from far-and-wide to represent a wider population.”
- Read more | 4,500 years ago, Arctic Greenland's Paleo-Inuit made terrifying ocean voyages. Why did they risk it?
Continuing to highlight the other potential explanations, he says that even the meaning of the burial itself remains open to interpretation: “regarding the mass grave itself, it might have been created by the survivors to honour loved ones and remembered as a focus of veneration, remembrance and resistance to the perpetrators – or a mass grave created to perpetuate intimidation and hegemony by the perpetrators.”
Without written records, the motivations behind the massacre can only be inferred indirectly – it can only be guesswork, based on the site itself, and knowledge of the broader context.
What the new research does demonstrate, however, is that large-scale violence in prehistoric Europe might not have been confined to battles between groups over land and resource, or beliefs and ideology. Some episodes of violence may have been deliberately staged acts to communicate power, intimidation and control. The challenge for historians and archaeologists is how to unpick the context of this violence: who it targeted, how it was carried out, and what it was intended to communicate – if anything at all.
]]> 4,500 years ago, Arctic Greenland's Paleo-Inuit made terrifying ocean voyages. Why did they risk it? https://www.historyextra.com/membership/4500-years-arctic-greenland-paleo-inuit-ocean-voyage/ Tue, 17 Feb 2026 16:03:54 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/4500-years-arctic-greenland-paleo-inuit-ocean-voyage/ Archaeological evidence from one of the High Arctic’s most dangerous marine environments reveals that the region’s earliest inhabitants were expert seafarers who undertook perilous open-ocean journeys Archaeologists have repeatedly underestimated the seafaring abilities of prehistoric peoples.
From the maritime traditions of Polynesia to the first crossings into the landmass known as Sahul – the prehistoric continent that once connected Australia, New Guinea, and Tasmania – over 60,000 years ago, claims of early ocean travel have often been met with raised eyebrows.
After all, it can be difficult to imagine how these humans crossed vast spans of dangerous water with such limited technology.
The prehistoric people who inhabited the Arctic have been no exception to this scepticism. Archaeologists refer to these early Arctic inhabitants as Early Paleo-Inuit: small and mobile hunting communities who lived across northern Greenland and Arctic Canada between roughly 4,500 and 2,800 years ago. For much of the 20th century, archaeologists assumed these communities were a land-based people, edging into frozen landscapes as ice sheets retreated, opening up new inland routes, rather than venturing across open water.
This view was shaped in part by the scarcity of evidence for boats and marine hunting technology, because organic materials such as boats, paddles and skins rarely survive in the archaeological record.
This lack of preservation is still a problem faced by archaeologists today. As a result, the true extent of prehistoric maritime activity in the Arctic – and across the globe – has long remained uncertain.
But a new discovery from northern Greenland is now challenging this long-standing view, providing the strongest evidence yet for something some Arctic specialists have long suspected.
How the Early Paleo-Inuit reached northern Greenland
In the far north of Greenland, beyond the limits of permanent modern settlement, sits a small archipelago called Kitsissut. More than 700 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle, this cluster of islands sits at a similar latitude to Norway’s Svalbard; one of the coldest and most ice-bound places on Earth. Reaching these islands by water is still a risk today, due to perilous currents and extreme weather conditions.
However, new archaeological research published in the journal Antiquity shows that almost 4,500 years ago – in the early Bronze Age, when the Old Kingdom of ancient Egypt was still at the height of its power – ancestors of modern Inuit populations were making this journey using nothing more than small boats constructed from animal skins stretched over lightweight timber frames.
The discovery challenges long-standing assumptions about how the Arctic was first inhabited. The region’s earliest peoples now appear to have been highly skilled seafarers, capable of repeated long-distance open-water voyages.
Reaching Kitsissut from the nearest known Early Paleo-Inuit settlement would have required an extraordinarily risky journey of more than 50 kilometres across open water. According to the researchers, this is the longest sea journey that can be confidently inferred for this period anywhere in the Arctic.
“That’s an extraordinary voyage in small skin-on-frame watercraft,” says Matthew Walls, the study’s lead author and an associate professor at the University of Calgary. “It would have required facing erratic weather, strong crosswinds, powerful currents and very high risk of being swept into the expanse of Baffin Bay.”
Why did the Early Paleo-Inuit head for Kitsissut?
But the question is not just how these people reached Kitsissut, but rather what could have drawn these people so far north, into such treacherous places.
The answer can be found in the Kitsissut islands’ location within Pikialasorsuaq, also known as the North Water polynya – a vast stretch of ocean between northern Greenland and Canada that remains ice-free even during the harsh Arctic winter. Polynyas form when ocean currents, winds and temperature differences prevent sea ice from forming despite sub-zero conditions. They are rare zones of open water amid otherwise frozen seas.
Unsurprisingly, polynyas are ecological hotspots. They provide refuge for huge numbers of fish and marine mammals, as well as vast seabird colonies – a rare concentration of food in an otherwise extremely challenging environment.
Commenting on the news to HistoryExtra, Professor Robert W Park, a specialist in Arctic archaeology at the University of Waterloo, explains that the seasonal importance of polynyas to Inuit communities would have been critical, especially in the coldest months. “During the cold part of the Arctic year, prey species need access to open water, and the polynya is the only place that stays open,” he says. “Every other part of the ocean is completely frozen.”
As a result, resources become highly concentrated around polynyas in winter and spring. “That’s when people would be there,” Park adds, “not during the summer, when resources are widely distributed across the land and ocean, and when there are long stretches of open water.”
But the same forces that make polynyas rich in wildlife also make them exceptionally dangerous to cross. Navigating these zones would have meant accepting the risks posed by freezing water temperatures and drifting sea ice capable of crushing small boats.
- Read more | A thousand years ago, the Vikings had a shock encounter with Native Americans that ended in disaster
For all the danger, Park notes that these journeys may not always have involved crossing uninterrupted stretches of open water. Instead, boats may have been used “not to traverse 50 kilometres of open water, but rather to travel and hunt in the patches of open water (called ‘leads’) between broken ice, [with people] hauling their boats up onto the ice when the leads close.”
The archaeological evidence of repeated Arctic voyages
No matter how far the open water crossings were, the evidence makes it clear that Kitsissut wasn’t reached by chance – for example, by a lone boat knocked off course.
Instead, generations of people returned to the islands again and again, over many centuries.
These conclusions are based on an extensive archaeological survey conducted on the central islands of the archipelago. Researchers documented nearly 300 archaeological features, including Early Paleo-Inuit tent rings and hearths. Tent rings – circles of stones used to anchor skin tents – are among the most common structural traces left by highly mobile Arctic cultures.
Many of these features cluster beneath towering seabird cliffs, where thick-billed murres nest by the thousands, creating a rich and predictable food source.
Radiocarbon dating of seabird bone recovered from one dwelling places human activity at the site between roughly 4,400 and 3,900 years ago, coinciding with the early formation of the polynya itself. This overlap suggests that human movement into the region occurred as this emerging ecological system became stable enough to support dense wildlife populations – highlighting the depth of Early Paleo-Inuit environmental knowledge.
“The fact that these early communities made this journey regularly, transporting families and supplies to access seasonal resources like seabird colonies at the islands, demonstrates a level of maritime skill that reshapes our understanding of this period,” Walls says.
As he adds, “reaching Kitsissut required skills that would have been a defining part of social life, passed down and refined as each generation re-learned by going out into the sea to travel and hunt.”
Arctic seafaring in a global context
This discovery fits within a broader pattern of archaeology’s long struggle to accurately capture early sea travel. Comparable distances once seemed implausible in other prehistoric contexts as well. Archaeological estimates of Polynesian voyaging ranges, for example, were routinely underestimated until experimental archaeology and indigenous knowledge demonstrated the true capabilities of early sea vessels.
- Read more | What happened to the people of Rapa Nui?
Speaking to HistoryExtra, Professor Sue Hamilton, former director of the UCL Institute of Archaeology, says that any comparisons between the Early Paleo-Inuit and Polynesian ocean crossings “are too separated in time, place, and environmental context to compare” – other than in terms of “the vastness of their ocean contexts.”
She explains that “the Polynesians travelled vast distances across the Pacific in double hulled canoes, using complex navigational observations relying on the stars, ocean swells, bird flights, and wind patterns.” These journeys involved crossing up to 300 kilometres of open ocean for up to three weeks, often against prevailing winds.
However, what does link the significance of the new research to this broader pattern, Hamilton says, is that in each case “watercraft had a central role in subsistence, social and ecological structure and survival.”
]]> Toilets through time: prehistoric toilets https://www.historyextra.com/membership/toilets-through-time-prehistoric-toilets/ Wed, 19 Nov 2025 10:51:53 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/toilets-through-time-prehistoric-toilets/ Dr Sue Greaney explains to David Musgrove what we know about loos from the Neolithic through to the Iron Age In episode six of Toilets Through Time, David Musgrove and Dr Sue Greaney look back at what we can learn about studying people's toilet habits from the Neolithic to the Iron Age. How and where did prehistoric people to go to the toilet, and what can we learn from studying their toilet habits? Dr Sue Greaney explains to David Musgrove what we know about loos from the Neolithic through to the Iron Age.
]]> Think men were always the hunters? Stone Age women took down mammoths too – and that's not all https://www.historyextra.com/period/prehistoric/stone-age-palaeolithic-women-hunters-social-role/ Sat, 11 Oct 2025 10:30:01 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/period/prehistoric/stone-age-palaeolithic-women-hunters-social-role/ What were the lives of women like throughout the Palaeolithic and Mesolithic periods? Modern archaeology is only just beginning to provide a clear picture Across the wide plains of central Europe some 20,000 years ago, small bands of people began their days preparing for work. Men and women alike readied their tools: some for hunting, some for gathering up roots and seeds, and others for crafting hides into winter clothing.
But the material evidence on which we base our knowledge of the Stone Age is fragmentary. “If we think about the Stone Age, we think about stone tools. Stone tools are what we can find in archaeological digs: they have survived, but so much of our past is perishable,” says Dr Victoria Bateman, author of Economica: A Global History of Women, Wealth and Power, speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast.
That fragility matters. If many activities, especially those often carried out by women, left no lasting trace, the archaeological evidence for life in prehistory is bound to be skewed. Yet, Bateman stresses, a patchy record doesn’t mean we know nothing – and what we do now know paints a picture of a nuanced, varied and active life for women of the Stone Age.
Life on the Palaeolithic steppe
In Ice Age Europe, bands of hunter-gatherers followed herds across a cold steppe dotted with patches of woodland. Their camps were often temporary: circles of hide tents, or hearths dug into the ground.
Excavations at sites such as Dolní Věstonice in the Czech Republic or Mezhirich in Ukraine reveal the ingenuity of these communities. At Mezhirich, dwellings were built from mammoth bones, their interiors scattered with flint tools, ochre pigments and fragments of woven fibres.
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Life was harsh, and women were certainly not confined to passive roles. They crafted clothing from hides and sinew, stitched with bone needles, and their handiwork was essential to life in freezing conditions. They gathered plants, berries, roots and nuts – knowledge that required expert ecological awareness. And, as recent research shows, many also took part in the hunt.
The invisible work of women
“In early societies, so much of what was produced – whether it was baskets or fishing nets, or some of the earliest forms of clothing – has disintegrated with time. Women were heavily involved in manufacturing those perishable goods, but because they haven’t survived, I think we have, to an extent, really sidelined women’s contribution to these societies,” says Bateman.
Occasionally, the past does leave a clue. At Pavlov in the Czech Republic, the imprint of a woven net survives on clay more than 25,000 years old. In waterlogged Mesolithic sites in Denmark, fragments of cord, fishing gear and wooden paddles provide glimpses of the vanished toolkit. Such finds emphasise how communities depended as much on fibres, textiles and nets as they did on stone spearheads.
Much of this labour was collaborative. Women likely taught daughters and sons how to spin fibres, twist cords or weave simple bags. The knowledge was generational and communal. Without it, the great hunts would have been impossible, because nets and ropes were as vital to trapping animals as spears.
The hunter–gatherer dichotomy
But who precisely were these hunters?
“When it comes to hunters, what does survive from the past are skeletons and the types of hunting equipment that they had with them. The long-standing assumption in archaeology was that if someone was buried with hunting tools then they must have been male,” Bateman explains.
This assumption reflected the mid-20th century world in which many archaeologists worked. The model of men as hunters by default neatly mirrored the roles seen across western societies at the time. In effect, modern gender norms were being projected back into deep history, creating a story of universal gender division that was simple to understand.
Recent decades of research have changed this thinking.
“It’s only in the last couple of decades or so that archaeologists have begun using the latest DNA technology – more recently examining teeth – to find out that some hunters originally presumed male were actually female,” says Bateman.
The results have been striking. In the Andes, a 9,000-year-old burial at Wilamaya Patjxa, Peru – long assumed to be male because it contained a big-game hunting kit – was revealed by DNA to be female. Similar reassessments across North and South America suggest that up to 40 per cent of hunters were women, “all of whom had just been assumed to be men because the default assumption was: men were the hunters,” Bateman notes.
Together, these discoveries show that even with incomplete evidence, new tools can overturn old certainties. The ‘gatherer’ label obscures a more dynamic picture in which women shifted between roles, with labour shaped as much by immediate needs, environments and group size as by gender.
What life was really like for prehistoric women
So – what might a day in the life of a prehistoric woman have looked like?
Imagine a Mesolithic camp on the shores of a Scandinavian lake some 8,000 years ago. At dawn, women might have checked fish traps woven from willow, while others gathered berries in plaited baskets. By mid-morning, a group might have set out with bows and arrows to stalk red deer, children in tow. Later, hides might have been scraped clean with flint and sinew twisted into threads.
Archaeological evidence is what creates this picture. Preserved fish traps from Denmark’s Ertebølle culture show women’s weaving skills at work. Bone needles and tailored garments from Ice Age burials prove that clothing was carefully crafted, not crudely thrown together. Charred remnants in hearths show that plant foods were a crucial part of the diet, often gathered by women. Flint tools worn smooth from scraping hides speak of the endless labour of preparing clothing.
The archaeological record will always be partial, but science is bringing back long lost voices. Prehistoric life was diverse and improvised – with roles dictated by much more than gender.
Victoria Bateman was speaking to Danny Bird on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.
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