The climate of the ancient Eastern Mediterranean was far more turbulent than previously thought — and a new study suggests that people adapted anyway.

Horses were being ridden, worked, and traded long before anyone thought it possible. New research pushes back the accepted timeline of human use of horses by centuries, showing that humans used horses in organized ways as early as the 4th millennium BCE, if not earlier.

Peruvian hairless dogs—a medium-sized elegant Indigenous breed with pointy ears—are widely represented in ancient Andean coastal pottery. Celebrated as a national symbol, they were declared part of Peru's cultural heritage in 2000. A new study published in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology examining dog skeletal remains and a mummified dog, provides the first physical evidence of Peruvian hairless dogs from the only Wari Empire site found to date, on the coast of northern Peru, known as Castillo de Huarmey. 

Recently, the archaeometry team from University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, in collaboration with National Center for Archaeology, Key Laboratory of Archaeological Sciences and Cultural Heritage, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Institute of Archaeology of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, utilized paleoproteomic technology to reveal that the feather decoration unearthed from Tomb No. 1 at Wuwangdun (Tomb of King Kaolie of Chu) of the late Warring States period (the late 3rd century BCE) were crafted from the feathers of multiple bird species, and that the used animal glue originated from the extinct short-horned water buffalo (Bubalus mephistopheles). This research not only fills the gap in the scientific analysis of archaeological feather remains in China but also extends the known survival time of the short-horned water buffalo by at least 700 years. The related findings were published in Science Bulletin entitled "Proteomic characterization of feather decorations and extinct buffalo glue during early Iron Age China".

Researchers have identified four more members of Sir John Franklin's 1845 expedition, one of whom was the subject of great debate lasting for more than a century.

Anthropologists from the Faculty of Arts at the University of Waterloo led the work that analyzed DNA samples extracted from skeletal remains and found matches with DNA donated by living descendants. These new discoveries bring the total number of identified sailors of the Franklin expedition to six.