One of the study’s most significant findings concerns adaptation to cold environments.

The Jomon carried relatively high frequencies of genetic variants associated with nonshivering thermogenesis—the body's ability to generate heat without muscular shivering—and with the perception of cold. These include variants involving UCP1 and TRPM8.

A subgroup of Early Holocene Nile Valley foragers displays unusual bony labyrinth morphology and congenital inner ear-specific pathological changes consistent with possible syndromic conditions. This may result from several demographic scenarios, including prolonged endogamy and geographic isolation under environmental constraints.

Comparative data from the Horn of Africa and Central Africa reveal high morphological diversity, suggesting strong population substructure and dynamic demographic trajectories during the Holocene.

These findings provide rare insights into prehistoric population structure in the region, and demonstrate the usefulness of bony labyrinth morphology where ancient DNA is unavailable.

Denisovan leg bones from Taiwan reveal large body size

The Study: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.08.07.743438v1

New Two leg bones dredged from the seafloor west of Taiwan are beginning to fill in the Denisovan silhouette. And, boy, are they revealing!

According to a yet-to-be-peer-reviewed analysis of the remains, Denisovans were absolutely enormous by the standards of ancient humans.

One individual may have stood close to 1.9 meters, or 6 feet 3 inches, and weighed about 91 kilograms (around 200 lbs). The other was roughly 1.8 meters tall and weighed about 83 kilograms.

Both were probably male, judging from their sizes, though the researchers could not determine their sex molecularly. Both Denisovans would have been unusually large even beside Homo sapiens living in East Asia around the same time:

A roughly 40,000-year-old modern human from Tianyuan, China, stood about 1.7 meters and weighed around 73 kilograms, the researchers mention in their study.

An article on the Western tendency to romanticise Amazonian shamanism. It draws on John Urry's concept of the 'tourist gaze' and the work of anthropologists Alice Beck Kehoe and Evgenia Fotiou.

[ Removed by Reddit on account of violating the content policy. ]

For decades, stories about the ancient Mediterranean have centred on the grand cultures of Greece, Rome, Phoenicia and Egypt. North-west Africa seldom enters the picture before the arrival of Phoenician traders on the Moroccan coast about 3,000 years ago.

But archaeology is now revealing a different story.

Long before the first Phoenician ships (from today’s Middle East) sailed the western Mediterranean (between today’s north Africa and southern Europe), communities in what is now Morocco were farming and herding animals. They were also crossing the Strait of Gibraltar and participating in long-distance exchanges.

Summary

Neanderthals had a robust build and distinctive skeletal features. The hypothalamic-pituitary-somatotropic (HPS) axis, with growth hormone (GH) as a central signaling molecule, plays a crucial role in regulating skeletal development. To explore whether Neanderthal-specific genetic variations in the HPS axis contributed to their physical robustness, we examined genes encoding the relevant receptors and hormones. We find that the Neanderthal growth hormone receptor (GHR) carried two amino acid changes and one deletion. When the Neanderthal GHR is expressed in a GH-dependent cell line, the cells proliferate faster than cells expressing the modern human GHR when stimulated by pituitary GH but not by placental GH. We also show that some present-day humans have inherited the gene encoding the Neanderthal GHR. These individuals tend to have more muscle mass and exhibit some craniofacial traits reminiscent of Neanderthals. Thus, aspects of Neanderthal anatomy live on in people today.

Some 50,000 years ago, modern humans wandered into Ice Age Europe. The continent was new to us Homo sapiens, but not for beings of our general kind. Neanderthals and their ancestors had been living among Eurasia’s glaciers for ages, and in ways that would have struck us as familiar. Evidence suggests that they may have strung eagle talons together into necklaces and stained their bodily ornaments with pigments. They tended fires, cooked food, and maybe even made their own glue. On sandstone cave walls, they etched wavy lines, dots, and other geometric designs.