Evolutionary Insights by Anthropology.net

A Poison on the Blade: Aconitine Traces and the Evidence for Surgical Anesthesia in Ming China

The scissors are 123mm long. So are the tweezers. Both are iron, nearly pure iron, the kind that only a mature smelting industry can reliably produce. They were buried sometime around the early fifteenth century with a man named Xia Quan, who died in 1411, in Jiangyin County in what is now Jiangsu Province, China. When archaeologists excavated the tomb in 1974, the instruments went to the Jiangyin Museum. Decades passed. Then someone looked more carefully at the rust. It wasn’t ordinary rust — or rather, it wasn’t only ordinary rust. In the places hardest to clean, the overlapping joints of the scissor blades, the recessed body of the tweezers near the handle, there were small deposits of bright red micro-residue. A team led by researchers from Northwest University in Xi’an collected just two milligrams from each instrument, a barely visible trace of red in a collection tube, and subjected them to a suite of analytical techniques. Their findings, published in Antiquity in 2026, suggest those red specks are the physical remnants of an anaesthetic applied during surgery more than six centuries ago. The substance in question is aconitine. It comes from plants of the Aconitum genus, a group that includes Aconitum carmichaelii and Aconitum kusnezoffii, both widely cultivated and collected across China. The alkaloid is extremely toxic. It is also, at controlled doses and in prepared form, a potent analgesic. Reading the residue Identifying organic compounds on corroded medieval iron is not straightforward. Conventional residue analysis techniques, including gas chromatography mass spectrometry, typically require larger samples and frequently fail when material is poorly preserved or quantities are minute. Early excavations in China compounded the problem by paying little attention to residue analysis at all, meaning that potential chemical evidence was often lost. The team addressed this by applying stimulated Raman scattering microscopy, an advanced optical technique that integrates spectroscopy and chemical imaging, and crucially, avoids the fluorescence interference that disrupts conventional Raman analysis. SRS works by detecting molecular vibrations at specific wavenumber ranges without needing to destroy the sample or extract more material than a microscope can accommodate. What they found in the residue particles was a characteristic cyano group (-CN) peak at around 2101–2105 cm⁻¹, alongside methylene (-CH₂-) stretching vibrations near 2848 cm⁻¹. The cyano absorption band is the telling signal: blood lacks cyano-compounds, so an organic residue containing a -CN group points away from biological contamination and toward a medicinal source. To confirm the identification, the team ran SRS analysis on a commercially prepared thin-tissue section of Aconitum carmichaelii as a reference. The reference spectrum showed a clear peak at 2103 cm⁻¹ in the cyano-stretching region, matching the residue exactly, and characteristic peaks at 2834, 2864, and 2882 cm⁻¹ in the C-H stretching region, closely mirroring the residue signals from both instruments. The ester group characteristic of intact aconitine (which would show up around 1700–1740 cm⁻¹) is absent from the spectra, which the team attributes to partial hydrolysis over six centuries. But the core chemical fingerprint, the cyano group and the methylene pattern, remained intact and detectable. The residues were also concentrated in the functional parts of the instruments, consistent with deposition during use rather than later contamination. The plant, the poison, and how to work around it Aconitum has a long history in Chinese medicine. The character for aconite appears in oracle bone script from around 1250–1046 BCE, making it one of the earliest documented plant drugs in the archaeological record. Shen Nong’s Materia Medica, compiled during the Han dynasty, records it formally. By the Song Dynasty, practitioners had begun distinguishing between the cultivated form (A. carmichaelii) and the wild form (A. kusnezoffii), noting that the latter was the more toxic of the two. Toxicity was understood explicitly, not as a side effect in the modern pharmacological sense, but as an inherent property of the plant that had to be actively managed. By the Ming period, a body of processing knowledge had developed around making Aconitum preparations safe enough to administer. Methods included boiling in vinegar, soaking in black soybean decoctions, treating with boys’ urine, detoxifying with mung beans, and removing the outer skin of the tuber. These preparations produced what texts refer to as Caowu San (草乌散), anaesthetic powder, documented in at least four Ming medical compilations including Shiyi’s Formulary of Tested Efficacy and the Compendium of Medicine. The primary function was to render patients insensitive to pain during surgery. Nineteen historical Chinese anaesthetic formulae survive in textual records. Most include A. carmichaelii or A. kusnezoffii or both, often in combination with other plants including Datura, Ligusticum chuanxiong, and Pinellia ternata. Wang Kentang’s Standards for Diagnosis and Treatment: Ulcer Treatment (1602) describes direct clinical procedure: before using scissors in surgery, one would first apply a numbing agent to the area, then cut. In dental procedures recorded in Miscellaneous Sayings from the Upper Pool, tweezers were used after applying a small amount of glutinous rice paste. The instruments, in other words, routinely came into direct or indirect contact with medicinal preparations. The concentration of residue on the Xia Quan tweezers, near the handle, covering an area of about 1.5mm, is consistent with a medicinal liquid having splashed onto this concealed area during topical application and escaped cleaning. This is exactly what Ming surgical texts prescribe: applying the numbing compound to the patient’s skin before cutting. The residue is not on the working tips of the instruments but in the recessed areas near the handles, where a liquid applied from a container during use would naturally accumulate and persist. What makes this find distinctive is precisely that gap between textual and physical evidence. Ming medical texts have long described anaesthetic preparations and their use in surgery. But describing a practice and demonstrating it materially are different things. The Xia Quan instruments now provide the latter: direct chemical evidence, on actual surgical tools from a datable tomb, for the presence of Aconitum alkaloids. Whether this constitutes incontrovertible proof is worth being clear about. The SRS identification rests on spectral pattern-matching rather than full molecular characterisation, and the constraints imposed by the Jiangyin Museum on destructive sampling meant the analytical scope was limited. The authors are appropriately measured in framing the result as “probable” traces of aconitine. But the convergence of chemical signature, instrument type, residue location, and textual record makes the interpretation coherent and well-supported. The instruments themselves are telling too. At around 97% iron each, both tools reflect what was achievable through Ming smelting technology at its height. Jiangsu Province was a thriving centre for medical practice during the Ming and Qing dynasties, and the iron industry of the period, transitioning from state-run to private operations through the early 1400s, was producing tools of sufficient purity and precision for surgical use. The scissors closely resemble what modern practitioners would recognise as straight operating scissors. The tweezers, with their inward-curved tips, bear a functional resemblance to Allis tissue forceps. These are not rough approximations. They are purpose-built instruments. That a physician practising surgery in fourteenth-century Jiangyin would apply a processed Aconitum preparation to a patient’s skin, pick up iron scissors and tweezers, and cut — and that those instruments would eventually carry molecular traces of the preparation into a tomb, through six hundred years of corrosion and storage, and into a spectrometer — is, to put it plainly, remarkable. Not because it requires us to revise what we knew about Ming medicine. The textual record already pointed here. But because the chemistry now agrees. Further Reading * Cheng, J.X. & Xie, X.S. (2015). Vibrational spectroscopic imaging of living systems: an emerging platform for biology and medicine. Science 350. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aaa8870 * Rageot, M. et al. (2023). Biomolecular analyses enable new insights into ancient Egyptian embalming. Nature 614: 287–93. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-05663-4 * Giachi, G. et al. (2013). Ingredients of a 2,000-y-old medicine revealed by chemical, mineralogical, and botanical investigations. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 110: 1193–96. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1216776110 * Czamara, K. et al. (2014). Raman spectroscopy of lipids: a review. Journal of Raman Spectroscopy 46: 4–20. https://doi.org/10.1002/jrs.4607 * Müller, B. et al. (1992). Raman studies of solid hydrogen cyanide (HCN, DCN) and of HCN argon matrices. Spectrochimica Acta Part A: Molecular Spectroscopy 49: 191–97. https://doi.org/10.1016/0584-8539(93)80174-9 This is a public episode. 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Pigeon Domestication Is Nearly a Thousand Years Older Than We Thought

Somewhere beneath the floors of a Bronze Age harbor city on Cyprus, excavators found the bones of pigeons. Not one or two. Dozens. Many were burned, consistent with cooking or deliberate disposal after a meal. Some belonged to juveniles that had never left the nest. And when researchers analyzed the chemical signatures locked in 37 of those bones, they found something that required some explaining: the pigeons had been eating almost exactly the same food as the people. That is the central finding of a study published in Antiquity by Anderson L. Carter, Canan Çakırlar, and colleagues at the University of Groningen and collaborating institutions. The site is Hala Sultan Tekke, on the southeastern coast of Cyprus, occupied during the Late Bronze Age from roughly 1650 to 1150 BCE. The birds are Columba livia — the rock dove, ancestor of every pigeon currently working a city sidewalk. The isotope signature matters because it is hard to explain away. Stable carbon and nitrogen values in bone collagen reflect what an animal ate over its lifetime. Wild birds forage opportunistically; their isotope values scatter widely. The pigeons at Hala Sultan Tekke did not scatter. Their dietary range was tighter than that of any other species in the regional comparison dataset — tighter even than cattle, which were actively herded and managed. Using a statistical measure of dietary breadth called the corrected standard ellipse area, the team found that pigeons had the most constrained niche of all taxa sampled: a value of 1.26, compared with 1.75 for humans and 1.80 for cattle. In ecological terms, these were animals occupying a narrow, managed dietary slot. The nitrogen values told a more specific story. The mean nitrogen isotope value for the main pigeon grouping sat at around 8.82 per mille, placing these birds above known scavenging populations like dogs (8 per mille) and foxes (8.26 per mille) and overlapping almost exactly with the human samples drawn from comparable Cypriot Bronze Age sites (9.92 per mille). Whatever these birds were consuming, it was consistent, protein-enriched relative to a purely wild diet, and closely tied to what humans were eating. The team’s interpretation is that the pigeons were living inside the city and eating its waste — grain spillage, scraps, and possibly deliberate supplemental feed from people who were managing them. “Either way,” writes senior author Çakırlar, “this very likely means that they were domesticated or on their way to being domesticated.” The presence of juvenile bones at multiple contexts across the site reinforces this picture. Fledgling Columba liviabones in an urban deposit are not what you get from wild birds passing through. They confirm that the pigeons were breeding within the settlement itself. What Domestication Actually Means Here The word “domesticated” is doing real work in this study, and the authors handle it with appropriate caution. Bone morphology cannot resolve the question for Columba livia. The species is exceptionally plastic: size varies enormously depending on climate, diet, and management practices. A population raised primarily for fertilizer production in a desert environment, like the Byzantine-period pigeons documented at Shivta and Saadon in the Negev by Marom and colleagues, stayed small even when clearly domesticated and housed in towers. Apply body-size criteria there and you would miss them entirely. The same metric that works reasonably well for cattle or pigs breaks down almost completely for pigeons. The Hala Sultan Tekke team measured 154 long bones and found all fell within the size range for C. livia, but the assemblage is not clearly distinguishable from a wild population on those grounds alone. What the isotopic and contextual data offer instead is evidence for a commensal relationship that had already tipped toward management. The authors describe this as consistent with the “commensal pathway” to domestication — a process by which animals gradually move into the human niche over many generations, initially attracted by food waste or shelter, and eventually subject to deliberate management. Rock doves naturally nest in rocky outcrops and cliff faces. The ashlar masonry attested at Hala Sultan Tekke suggests the city had multi-story buildings with sheer facades that could have functioned as adequate substitutes. The relevant comparison for dating purposes is Nea Helos, a Hellenistic site in Greece where the earliest previously identified assemblage of morphologically domesticated pigeon bones was recovered, dated to roughly the fourth through first centuries BCE. The Hala Sultan Tekke material predates that by somewhere between nine hundred and a thousand years. A 2023 genomic study identified modern domestic pigeons as most closely related to wild populations from the Middle East, pointing toward at least one domestication event in that region — consistent with the Cypriot evidence but not specifically pinpointed to it. Carter and colleagues are explicit that Hala Sultan Tekke does not represent the origin of pigeon domestication. It represents the earliest direct biomolecular evidence for a commensal human-pigeon relationship that we currently have. The Feast Most of the pigeon bones — 82 percent by minimum number of individuals — came from a single area of the site, City Quarter 1. Within it, a significant concentration was recovered from two interconnected rooms, numbered 70 and 83. These had been flagged during excavation as a cultic space. They contained a large stone structure functioning as a table or altar, burnt deposits of animal remains from multiple species, ceramic vessels representing at least three different production traditions (local Cypriot, Mycenaean, and Canaanite), Egyptian faience beads, gold leaf, a Mycenaean figurine, and carbonized botanical remains including olive, grape, and cereals. The excavators classified these as feasting deposits. Feasting in Bronze Age Cyprus was not incidental. It was structurally embedded — politically, socially, and in mortuary practice. The finds from rooms 70 and 83 have the material profile of repeated formal events: multiple episodes of burning, tableware from across the Mediterranean, architecturally demarcated space. Pigeon bones appear not only in that cultic core but also in wells that served as refuse pits near tomb areas, and in at least one tomb deposit directly. The birds were showing up across the entire social register of the site’s ritual life. Just over half of all the C. livia specimens showed contact with fire. The most parsimonious explanation is that the birds were cooked and eaten, then their bones discarded in the ritual space or burned as part of the offering itself. In birds of this body size, butchery marks are not necessary for consumption and are not expected to be preserved even when the animal was processed — so the absence of cut marks does not complicate the picture. Whether any of this had a direct connection to the cult of Aphrodite, with whom pigeons are closely associated in classical Cypriot tradition, remains an open question. Pigeon and dove figurines appear on Cyprus from the Middle Bronze Age onward, and the island was identified in antiquity as Aphrodite’s birthplace. Her affinity for the birds is well-documented in artistic representations from across the Mediterranean. The paper acknowledges this interpretive framework while noting that no temple or sanctuary has been identified at Hala Sultan Tekke specifically. The cultic deposits are real. Their precise theological affiliation is not resolved. Three individuals in the isotope dataset sat apart from the main grouping, with lower nitrogen values overlapping with wild herbivores rather than with the human range. The authors raise the possibility that these birds came from a different setting — possibly Trypes, a rural site under Hala Sultan Tekke’s administrative control, identified as a probable granary and livestock supplier. Whether they were brought to the city specifically for consumption, or represent pigeons with a more independent relationship to the human environment, the bones do not say. Hala Sultan Tekke was destroyed twice around 1200 to 1150 BCE and then abandoned, its bay having silted up and severed what had been one of the most active trading connections in the eastern Mediterranean. The destruction coincided with the Bronze Age collapse that ended dozens of cities across the region. The pigeons almost certainly outlasted the city. Columba livia is remarkably good at that. Further Reading * Hernández-Alonso, G. et al. (2023). Redefining the evolutionary history of the rock dove, Columba livia, using whole genome sequences. Molecular Biology and Evolution 40. https://doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msad243 * Marom, N. et al. (2018). Pigeons at the edge of the empire: bioarchaeological evidences for extensive management of pigeons in a Byzantine desert settlement in the southern Levant. PLoS ONE 13. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0193206 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anthropology.net/subscribe [https://www.anthropology.net/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

Inequality Fell as Mohenjo-daro Grew

In the oldest levels of a neighborhood called DK-G South, the houses are large. The largest date to around 2500 BC and cover more than 160 square meters of floor plan. This isn’t surprising for a Bronze Age city. What’s surprising is what happens next. Over the following four centuries, as Mohenjo-daro continued to grow and fill in, housing inequality fell. Not marginally. By around 2100 BC, the Gini coefficient of residential disparity in DK-G South had dropped to 0.23, a figure typical of Neolithic farming villages, not major urban centers. The gap between the largest and smallest homes had narrowed to something archaeologists usually associate with societies that don’t yet have cities. Mohenjo-daro had tens of thousands of residents. It had standardized brick construction, a citywide drainage network, a grid of streets, a sophisticated system of weights and measures, and a vigorous long-distance trade network that extended to Mesopotamia. It was, by any reasonable measure, one of the most functionally complex urban environments on earth in the third millennium BC. And it appears to have been getting more equal as it matured. That finding is the core of a new study by Adam Green, Iqtedar Alam, and Cameron Petrie, published in Antiquity in 2026. Their analysis draws on excavation data from the earliest twentieth-century digs at the site, converting house footprints into Gini coefficients through a GIS-based approach. The Gini coefficient is a standard economic measure of distributional inequality: zero means total equality, one means total concentration. Their results put the city’s overall residential Gini at 0.44, well below contemporaneous Mesopotamian cities like Ur and Ugarit, which both score above 0.6. The ancient Greek site of Knossos sits at 0.86. The Classic Maya city of Palenque at 0.75. Mohenjo-daro was already an outlier by those comparisons. But the diachronic data from DK-G South is what makes the study genuinely provocative. What the houses say The standard archaeological assumption is that cities generate inequality. The logic is intuitive: larger populations mean more specialization, more specialization means more occupational hierarchy, and hierarchy means wealth concentrates at the top. V. Gordon Childe codified this in his 1950 “urban revolution” framework, which treated social stratification as a defining feature of cities. Neoevolutionary theory went further, treating the state as essentially defined by stratification. If you had a city, you had elites; if you couldn’t find the elites, you weren’t looking hard enough. Indus archaeologists spent much of the later twentieth century fighting this prior. Mohenjo-daro and the other major Indus sites lack the usual material signatures of hierarchical power: no palaces, no royal tombs, no temples accessible only to a priestly class, no statues of rulers. The arguments went back and forth. Some scholars concluded the Indus must have been a complex chiefdom or non-state. Others countered that a civilization that built cities at this scale must have had elites, even if the evidence was missing. Absence of evidence wasn’t evidence of absence, or so the argument ran. What Green and colleagues have added is a quantitative dimension to a debate that had stayed largely qualitative. And the quantitative data doesn’t just confirm the impression that Mohenjo-daro was relatively equal. It shows the city moving in a direction opposite to what the theory predicts. The method has known limitations, which the authors are explicit about. Gini coefficients of house size are not a comprehensive picture of social inequality. They don’t capture differences in movable wealth, in gender or kinship status, or in access to political power that doesn’t manifest architecturally. A wealthy person might not invest in a larger house. A small structure might house a powerful family. The measure also struggles with people who have no residence at all, the poorest members of any ancient city. These caveats matter. But the measure does capture one real economic dimension: access to labor and resources at the household level. And it allows direct comparison across sites and time periods, which is why the Global Dynamics of Inequality (GINI) project has assembled this kind of data from hundreds of ancient settlements worldwide. Mohenjo-daro now sits in that database, and what it shows is distinctive. The governance question The DK-G South sequence tracks five periods from roughly 2500 to 2100 BC. The earliest period shows a Gini of 0.39 and a median house size of 161 square meters. By the latest period, the Gini is 0.23 and the median has dropped to 141 square meters, but with much less variance. The log standard deviation of house areas falls from 0.73 to 0.44 over the same span. Houses weren’t just smaller on average; they were converging toward a common size. This convergence happened alongside something else: the city’s residences became more uniformly aligned with Mohenjo-daro’s street grid. In the earlier levels, structures are arranged more loosely. In the later levels, they lock into the urban plan. Green and colleagues read this correlation as suggestive of governance, that the same collective decisions that built and maintained public infrastructure also shaped residential space in ways that narrowed the gap between households. What that governance looked like in practice is uncertain, and the study doesn’t overclaim. There are no deciphered texts from the Indus Civilization, no royal inscriptions, no administrative archives of the kind that survive from Mesopotamia. But the material record offers indirect evidence for distributed authority. Indus seals, small stone stamps that likely facilitated exchange and credit, were found primarily in private residences at Mohenjo-daro rather than in temples or central administrative buildings. In Mesopotamia, equivalent objects concentrated in institutional contexts, where a palace or temple controlled trade. At Mohenjo-daro, the tools of economic governance were spread across the city’s households. Green has previously characterized this contrast in terms of where the power to govern exchange sat: distributed rather than monopolized, and for that reason probably harder to weaponize against ordinary residents. The same logic extends to the standardized weights and measures used across the entire Indus region. This wasn’t a system enforced from a single administrative center. It was a shared protocol adopted by communities across a vast area, a form of coordination without centralized control. Green and colleagues point to the decline in residential disparity coinciding with more structured urban development, and suggest that the same governance producing civic amenities may also have constrained how unevenly residential space was distributed. Green has described Mohenjo-daro as having had “deliberative spaces” where collective decisions about the city were made. The new Gini data, tentatively, supports something like that interpretation. The declining inequality wasn’t random drift. It tracked with urban development in a way consistent with intentional decisions about how the city was organized. One further pattern in the data is worth noting carefully. As inequality declined, productivity appears to have risen. The GINI project uses mean residence area as a rough proxy for household wealth and productivity. In DK-G South, median residence area bottomed out at about 98 square meters in the Late III Period, around 2200 BC, as the Gini was still falling. Then, in the latest period, when the Gini reaches its low of 0.23, median residence area rebounds to 141 square meters. Gregory Possehl had already noted, separately, that there is more evidence for craft production in the city’s later levels. The authors are cautious here, and rightly so: the sample sizes are small and the relationship isn’t statistically robust. But the pattern raises a pointed question about causality. Development economics since Kuznets has generally assumed that growth generates inequality, and that only after growth reaches a certain threshold does redistribution become viable. Thomas Piketty’s analysis of capitalist economies complicates this picture but doesn’t overturn the basic direction of the arrow. The Mohenjo-daro data, if interpreted at face value, runs that arrow the other way: collective governance constrained inequality, and declining inequality may have contributed to a subsequent rise in productivity. The city’s most equal period appears to be its most productive. That is a speculative reading, and the paper says so. But it’s the kind of speculation that makes a dataset useful beyond its immediate empirical scope. Mohenjo-daro isn’t a policy prescription. It is a natural experiment, running across four centuries, that complicates the idea that inequality is an unavoidable cost of urban complexity. The site still holds a great many unanswered questions. The chronological resolution outside DK-G South is poor; most other excavated areas collapse multiple building phases into a single unit, which almost certainly inflates the overall Gini by mixing large early structures with smaller later ones. Future work revisiting structural chronologies from the rest of the site could sharpen the picture considerably. Projects like M-LAB at the Pratt Institute are already working to reinterpret Mohenjo-daro’s legacy datasets with more rigorous methods. For now, the numbers from DK-G South say something that’s hard to dismiss: as this Bronze Age city built itself into maturity, its wealthiest households and its poorest ones were moving toward each other. That doesn’t happen by accident. Further Reading * Childe, V.G. 1950. The urban revolution. The Town Planning Review 21: 3–17. https://doi.org/10.3828/tpr.21.1.k853061t614q42qh * Green, A.S. 2020. Debt and inequality: comparing the ‘means of specification’ in the early cities of Mesopotamia and the Indus civilization. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 60. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaa.2020.101232 * Green, A.S. 2022. Of revenue without rulers: public goods in the egalitarian cities of the Indus civilization. Frontiers in Political Science 4. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpos.2022.823071 * Green, A.S. et al. 2025. Kuznets’ tides: an archaeological perspective on the long-term dynamics of sustainable development. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 122. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2400603121 * Kohler, T.A. et al. 2025. Introducing the special feature on housing differences and inequality over the very long term. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 122. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2401989122 * Kuznets, S. 1955. Economic growth and income inequality. The American Economic Review 45: 1–28. * Piketty, T. 2014. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. * Possehl, G.L. 2002. The Indus Civilization: A Contemporary Perspective. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anthropology.net/subscribe [https://www.anthropology.net/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

Thirty-Seven People in One Stone Jar

Jar 1 at Site 75 sat in forest roughly 70 kilometers northeast of Phonsavan, on the Xieng Khouang Plateau in northern Laos. It was already in poor condition when researchers found it: the sides partially collapsed, the interior open to the elements. But the base was intact, and within the remaining walls, the original sediment deposits had been preserved. Over three field seasons between 2022 and 2024, a team led by Nicholas Skopal of James Cook University excavated it completely. What they found was dense. Bones packed without obvious vertical structure, skulls clustered toward the jar’s edges, long bones bundled together. When the osteologists worked through the assemblage, counting from the most commonly repeated skeletal elements, they arrived at a minimum of 37 individuals. The highest count came from dentition: 469 observed teeth, producing an MNI of 37. The youngest was approximately 18 months old. Adults of varying ages were present throughout. “The big jar we’ve found is unique,” Skopal told reporters, “and I’ve seen a lot of jars.” That uniqueness matters. Hundreds of large stone vessels are scattered across more than 120 known sites on the Xieng Khouang Plateau. The most studied concentration is near Phonsavan, the so-called Plain of Jars, where some jars reach three meters in height and weigh several tons. The first systematic survey was done by French archaeologist Madeleine Colani in the 1930s. She rejected the idea that the vessels were storage containers and proposed a funerary role. A local legend holds that giants used them to brew rice wine. Scholarship since Colani has leaned toward mortuary use, but the physical evidence has been thin. A few jars contained ash and burned bone fragments. Some had burial pits dug nearby. Most were empty, which made the funerary hypothesis difficult to confirm with any confidence. If each jar was a tomb, why did so few of them hold human remains? Jar 1 makes that question answerable, and the answer involves movement. A Multistep Death The critical detail about the bones inside Jar 1 is their disarticulation. Most joints had already separated before the remains were placed inside. The bones had not come from bodies laid directly into the jar. They came from bodies that had decomposed somewhere else first. This is secondary burial: the deliberate reinterment of already-processed skeletal material after an initial phase of decomposition away from the final deposit. The paper’s most consequential observation follows from this. About 500 meters west of Jar 1, the team found a second cluster of seven smaller stone jars. None of them contained human remains. The ceramics found near these smaller vessels are consistent with the assemblage from Jar 1’s surrounding context, suggesting the two locations were used at the same time by the same community. The working hypothesis is that the smaller jars served as the initial stage: a newly dead person would have been placed in one, the flesh allowed to separate from the bone, and then the cleaned skeletal remains transferred to the large jar. Skopal described the logic to Science News [https://www.sciencenews.org/article/jar-human-bones-solve-laos-mystery]: “Maybe they used those [smaller] stone jars to ‘distill’ the bodies, so when someone died, they might have put the body in there so all the flesh came off. Then they took the bones and they put them in this big jar, so it’s almost like a crypt.” But the process may not have ended there. The team noted a discrepancy between the minimum individual count from dental remains and the lower count derived from cranial and postcranial elements alone. Bones appear to be missing. Some may have been selectively removed from Jar 1 after deposition, possibly for reinterment at a habitation site or place of worship. Stone slabs found inside the jar are comparable to those used as markers for secondary bundle burials at other Plain of Jars sites. Comparable practices of secondary processing and relocation of skeletal remains are documented across northeast India, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam during the Iron Age and Historical periods. The large jar, on this reading, was not the end of the journey. It was a stage in an ongoing process. The radiocarbon dates establish how long that process ran. Eight bone and tooth samples returned results spanning approximately cal AD 890 to 1160, a range of roughly 270 years. Charcoal from pottery deposited in an adjacent trench dated to cal AD 890 to 1020, consistent with the early end of the skeletal dates. The jar was not filled in a single event. Generations of a family, or an extended kin group, returned to it repeatedly. “The number of individuals also suggests the jars were owned by family or extended family groups,” Skopal noted in the press release accompanying publication. “They likely served as places where ancestral rites were performed over generations.” Four skulls were found with their mandibles still in close association, a small departure from the general pattern of disarticulation. The jaw is typically among the first elements to separate during decomposition. Their preservation together raises the possibility that in some cases, a recently dead or only partially processed individual was placed inside the jar directly, perhaps with greater ceremony. The osteological analysis is ongoing. One other detail is worth holding onto. At least two individuals show deliberate tooth ablation: the intentional removal of specific teeth during life. One person lost both upper lateral incisors; another lost both lower central incisors. Tooth ablation is documented widely across prehistoric and historical mainland Southeast Asia and southern China, where it appears associated with social identity and life transitions. Its presence at Site 75 places this community within a broad pattern of shared bodily practice across the region. What the Beads Know Twenty glass beads came out of the jar during wet-sieving of the sediments. Orange, turquoise-blue, dark blue, black, red-over-orange. Twelve were selected for chemical analysis by laser ablation mass spectrometry at the Field Museum in Chicago, and the results upend any assumption that the Xieng Khouang Plateau was a remote backwater. Nine of the beads matched a mineral soda-high alumina composition produced in eastern South India, a glass type that circulated across South and Southeast Asia from roughly the end of the first millennium BC through the eleventh century AD. Two beads had a soda plant-ash composition whose chemistry aligns most closely with Mesopotamian glass, the type that appears at Southeast Asian sites dating from the eighth or ninth century through the eleventh century AD, before later sites begin yielding Egyptian glass instead. The team notes that the temporal overlap between the Mesopotamian glass signature and the radiocarbon dates from the jar is consistent. One dark-blue bead had a potash-rich composition more commonly dated to 300 BC through AD 300, most likely from southeastern China or northern Vietnam. The team treats it as a curated antique, a much older object that had been kept, traded, or passed down. No glassmaking tradition is known from the Lao highlands. These beads arrived from elsewhere, through exchange networks that extended from the Laotian interior to the Indian subcontinent and the Near East. They are not rare luxury goods in the way that term sometimes gets misused in archaeology; they are trade goods, the kind of thing that moved in bulk along commercial routes. Their presence in a burial jar in upland Laos means the people using that jar were connected to those routes. The timing sharpens the point. The period cal AD 890 to 1160 sits within an era of expanding commercial connectivity across Asia. The Song Dynasty in China was actively intensifying long-distance trade. The Khmer Empire was at its height. The Dali Kingdom in Yunnan extended into parts of northern Laos. The Đại Việt and Champa kingdoms controlled Vietnam. The Pagan Kingdom held Myanmar. All of these states were embedded in overland and maritime exchange networks that moved goods, technologies, and cultural practices across vast distances. The team proposes that the jar sites may have sat at nodal points along routes connecting East and Southeast Asia, the plateau elevated enough to serve as a waypoint, the communities there integrated into the wider system. The Mesopotamian beads in Jar 1 are physical evidence for the highland end of that connectivity. Miriam Stark, an anthropologist at the University of Hawaii not involved in the study, told Science News [https://www.sciencenews.org/article/jar-human-bones-solve-laos-mystery] that the collective mortuary assemblage was exactly what she had hoped to see discovered. But she pressed on the gap that the data still cannot close: “I do wonder, where did these people live?” No settlements associated with the Plain of Jars tradition have ever been found. No houses, hearths, or refuse deposits. The entire archaeological record of these communities consists, almost entirely, of what they did with their dead. The jar sites are the only material evidence of who they were, and most of those sites are empty. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.anthropology.net/subscribe [https://www.anthropology.net/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

A Neanderthal Had a Tooth Drilled 59,000 Years Ago. The Evidence Is Still in the Tooth.

Somewhere in the Altai Mountains roughly 59,000 years ago, a Homo neanderthalensis sat still while someone drilled into their tooth with a pointed piece of jasper. We know this because the tooth survived. It came out of Chagyrskaya Cave in southwestern Siberia as specimen Chagyrskaya 64, a lower second molar from an adult individual, and when paleoanthropologist Alisa Zubova of the Russian Academy of Sciences and her colleagues examined it, something was immediately wrong. There was a hole in it. Not a small one — a large, irregular concavity measuring 4.2 mm long, 2.8 mm wide, and 2.6 mm deep, positioned at the center of the occlusal surface and reaching all the way down to the floor of the pulp chamber. Around the edges, visible at magnifications up to 500x, were fine linear striations. The kind left by a rotating tool. “We were intrigued by the unusual shape of the concavity on the tooth’s chewing surface,” said Zubova in a statement accompanying the study. “It differed from the normal morphology of the pulp chamber and did not match the typical pattern of carious lesions seen in Homo sapiens. Moreover, distinctly visible scratches suggested that the concavity was not the result of natural damage but of intentional actions.” Their analysis, published May 13, 2026 in PLOS One, presents a compelling case that Chagyrskaya 64 carries the oldest known evidence of deliberate dental treatment in human evolutionary history — predating the previous record holder by more than 40,000 years. What the Tooth Actually Shows Before accepting the drilling interpretation, the team had to work through the alternatives. A deep concavity in an old molar could plausibly result from severe wear, a fracture, or natural carious decay. None of these fit. Dental trauma leaves sharp, fractured edges. The concavity walls in Chagyrskaya 64 are smooth and rounded. Extreme attrition can expose the pulp chamber, but it cannot widen it — and the upper portion of the concavity is broader than the pulp chamber below, which rules out wear as the cause. The comparison sample from the same stratigraphic layer, another Chagyrskaya molar recovered from identical sediment, shows intense occlusal wear but a completely flat chewing surface, no concavity, and uniformly mineralized dentin. Micro-CT imaging told a different story for Chagyrskaya 64. The tooth showed pervasive demineralization of primary dentin, corresponding to Grade 4 or 5 on the Downer diagnostic scale — severe, deep caries extending into both inner and outer dentin. The absence of secondary dentin in a heavily worn tooth is itself anomalous; normally, the pulp responds to attrition by laying down reparative tissue. Here it hadn’t, because the infection had already destroyed it. There was no secondary dentin to form. The morphology of the concavity also doesn’t match anything caries produce naturally. Bacterial decay works by chemical demineralization, creating soft tissue breakdown and irregular cavities. It does not excavate clean, sub-rounded depressions with parallel microstriations on the walls. Those striations, analyzed under scanning electron microscopy, are oriented parallel to the concavity walls and exhibit a corrugated, ridged structure consistent with a rotating tool edge. They appear in at least two discrete locations, at slightly different depths, suggesting the tool was worked from multiple angles. And critically: over the striations, there is polish. Ante-mortem wear, from years of chewing after the procedure was done. Drilling in the Dark To test whether a jasper perforator could actually produce this kind of concavity, Zubova and colleagues ran a series of experiments on three modern Homo sapiens molars. Two came from undocumented Holocene archaeological collections. The third — an upper left third molar with an untreated cavity and no previous dental work — was contributed by one of the authors. The tools were fabricated from local jasperoid raw material, matching what was available at Chagyrskaya Cave. The experiments were conducted by a single researcher experienced in Paleolithic stone knapping, with a small amount of water added to simulate the oral environment. The technique that worked was manual rotation — holding the pointed perforator between two fingers and drilling with a twisting motion, not scraping. Scraping spread force too broadly and produced only surface striations. The rotational method disrupted the tooth surface within seconds. Penetrating through to the pulp chamber took between 35 and 50 minutes of continuous drilling. The research team notes this is probably a conservative estimate for the original procedure. Working inside a living person’s mouth, with limited visibility, constrained access, and an uncooperative patient, could easily double the time. Neanderthals have thinner enamel than Homo sapiens, distributed over a larger volume of coronal dentin. The infection in Chagyrskaya 64 had already softened the dentin considerably. Both factors likely made the drilling faster. Still: somewhere between one and two hours of someone boring into your tooth with a sharp rock. Raman spectroscopy of the tooth surface detected no residue of plant material, resins, or analgesics. The team notes this doesn’t rule out their use — if the individual lived and chewed on the tooth for years afterward, any herbal packing would long since have worn away. But it leaves open the possibility that no painkiller was used at all. The experimental results matched the archaeological tooth closely. The groove profiles on both share a similar V-shaped morphology, with gently sloping outer walls. The width of the experimentally produced grooves (0.249 mm) closely approximates what’s preserved on Chagyrskaya 64 (0.294 mm). Macrotraces are more pronounced in the experimental specimens — expected, given that they hadn’t then spent 59,000 years in sediment with subsequent wear on top. Microtraces on the original molar are accordingly faint, but present. The concavity itself is not a single depression. Micro-CT shows three partially overlapping depressions that together occupy the entire pulp chamber volume. Whether they were drilled in separate episodes or represent the practitioner widening the cavity as they worked isn’t clear from the preservation. The team’s experimental replication of a three-depression configuration suggests the smallest of the three was probably an early stage, with the two deeper ones expanded after initial penetration. One possibility is that the third depression targeted a separate area of carious tissue. Another is that it was an error — stone tools aren’t precision instruments. The Broader Picture Caries are rare among Neanderthals. Fewer than ten cases have been identified across the entire fossil record, from sites including Palomas, Bau de l’Aubesier, De Nadale, and Kebara. All the previously known cases involve minor lesions confined to enamel or upper dentin, none reaching the pulp chamber. Chagyrskaya 64 is in a class by itself. The Chagyrskaya population appears to have been particularly susceptible. Another tooth from the same cave, Chagyrskaya 18, is a naturally shed deciduous molar from a Neanderthal child of about 9 to 11 years. It carries two carious lesions. The smaller of the two has already breached through the enamel into the upper dentin. The larger is still confined to enamel but actively demineralizing. Two caries cases in a small population is unusual for Neanderthals; the team suggests it may indicate the presence of specific cariogenic bacteria in the local oral microbiome rather than a dietary shift, since isotopic evidence from Chagyrskaya places these individuals squarely within the dietary range of other European Neanderthals. Chagyrskaya 64 also carries a second ante-mortem modification: a pronounced interproximal groove on its distal surface, with microscopic parallel striations characteristic of Stage 4 toothpick use-wear. A nascent groove is also forming on the mesial surface. The same tooth was toothpicked on both sides and then drilled. The toothpick groove sits precisely where demineralization is concentrated in the cervical area — over a second, smaller carious lesion. The drilling concavity sits over the larger lesion on the occlusal surface. Two interventions, two lesions, two tools. Toothpicking behavior predates H. neanderthalensis considerably. Interproximal wear grooves appear on teeth attributed to Homo habilis from Olduvai Gorge, and the same wear pattern has been documented in Japanese macaques (Macaca fuscata). The behavior itself isn’t cognitively remarkable. But drilling is something else. The rotational technique requires coordinated fine motor control, sustained application of force in a confined space, and — given the documented grain of the striations — deliberate adjustment of the tool’s angle during the procedure. The team notes that analysis of bone retouchers from Chagyrskaya Cave shows Neanderthals there typically held tools between two fingers during knapping, a technique already requiring significant digital precision. The previous oldest evidence of dental intervention belongs to an individual from Ripari Villabruna in northeastern Italy, dated to around 14,000 years ago. That tooth, a third molar from a late Upper Paleolithic H. sapiens, shows traces of enamel scraping around a carious lesion. Micro-CT of the Villabruna tooth shows substantial retention of demineralized tissue — the scraping was superficial, limited largely to the enamel surface. It would not have relieved the pain of deep infection. Chagyrskaya 64 represents not just an earlier intervention but a more effective one, by a population whose tool-use repertoire apparently included the insight that drilling into the pulp chamber — deliberately and completely — would stop the pain by destroying the nerve. Whether this constitutes knowledge in any formal sense, or something closer to problem-solving arrived at under extreme duress, is a question the tooth cannot answer. What it does answer is whether the capacity existed. The individual who drilled Chagyrskaya 64 identified a source of pain, selected an appropriate tool, executed a controlled invasive procedure, and their patient then went on to chew with the treated tooth for long enough to wear it smooth. “What struck me, and continues to strike me, is what an incredibly strong-willed person this Neanderthal must have been,” said Lydia Zotkina, co-author of the study. “Now, every time I go to the dentist, I think about that guy.” Further Reading * Oxilia G, Peresani M, Romandini M, Matteucci C, Spiteri CD, Henry AG, et al. Earliest evidence of dental caries manipulation in the Late Upper Palaeolithic. Scientific Reports. 2015;5:12150. https://doi.org/10.1038/srep12150 * Kolobova KA, Roberts RG, Chabai VP, Jacobs Z, Krajcarz MT, Shalagina AV, et al. Archaeological evidence for two separate dispersals of Neanderthals into southern Siberia. PNAS. 2020;117(6):2879–85. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1918047117 * Mafessoni F, Grote S, de Filippo C, Slon V, Kolobova KA, Viola B, et al. A high-coverage Neandertal genome from Chagyrskaya Cave. PNAS. 2020;117(26):15132–6. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2004944117 * Skov L, Peyrégne S, Popli D, Iasi LNM, Devièse T, Slon V, et al. Genetic insights into the social organization of Neanderthals. Nature. 2022;610(7932):519–25. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-05283-y * Faux P, Ding L, Ramirez-Aristeguieta LM, et al. Neanderthal introgression in SCN9A impacts mechanical pain sensitivity. Communications Biology. 2023;6(1):958. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-023-05286-z * Estalrrich A, Alarcón JA, Rosas A. Evidence of toothpick groove formation in Neandertal anterior and posterior teeth. American Journal of Physical Anthropology. 2017;162(4):747–56. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajpa.23166 This is a public episode. 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