Qurayyah Painted Ware, 3200-yr-old ceramics, painted with distinctive black-and-red geometric designs, stylized animals and human figures, may have been an early example of an ancient "brand"

Researchers from University College Dublin have found that animal bones discovered at Ferriter’s Cove in County Kerry, previously believed to be the earliest evidence of domesticated cattle in Ireland and Britain, actually belonged to bear and wild boar. The discovery challenges a long-standing interpretation of the site and raises questions about the evidence for early contact between Ireland’s Mesolithic hunter-gatherers and Neolithic farming communities in Europe.

Ancient Egyptians routinely reopened, reused, and transformed burial spaces. But how does this show in tombs? Researchers have examined how repeated use of a chamber in a Theban tomb is reflected by the mummies in it. They found a switch from individualized burial units inside coffins to collective interment, alongside changes in the positioning of limbs and funerary objects. During later phases of the chamber’s use, mummies were stacked one above another – but this doesn’t mean chaos reigned or that certain burial practices were discontinued. Instead, it shows a process of reuse that could help develop a better understanding of the social behaviors behind funerary practices.

A 4,000-year-old painted stone plaque discovered on a remote Indonesian island is the first known example of portable art belonging to the Austronesian Painting Tradition (APT).

A new archaeobotanical study by researchers from the University of Oxford and the University of Kiel has revealed that increases in cereal grain size at the dawn of agriculture, more than 11,000 years ago, were initially driven by plants' plastic responses to favourable growing conditions, rather than by genetic selection under cultivation as previously thought. To test competing explanations for early grain enlargement, the international team applied an integrated analytical approach combining morphological, weed ecological and stable carbon isotope analyses of charred barley and emmer wheat remains recovered from the Pre-Pottery Neolithic settlements of el-Hemmeh and Sharara located in the Wadi el-Hasa, Jordan. The study, now published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS) shows that developmental plasticity played a key role in shaping the evolutionary trajectories of cereals before they became domesticated.

Communities living in Colombia thousands of years ago achieved an engineering wonder of the world based on cooperation among family groups without top-down government, a new study shows. Archaeologists argue that policymakers in Colombia should now adopt a similar strategy to solve the country’s current water management crisis.

In a paper published in SCIENCE CHINA Earth Sciences, a research team led by Professor Chengbang An reconstructed 4,000 years of dietary evolution in the central-eastern Eurasian Steppe from the Bronze Age to the Tang Dynasty, revealing synchronized dietary shifts across multiple regions: increased millet and meat consumption from the Early Iron Age to the Han Dynasty, followed by a return to wheat- and barley-based C₃ diets during the Jin-Tang periods. The study further demonstrates that these transitions were jointly driven by climate change, intensified interregional interaction among pastoralist groups, and innovations in grain processing technology. This work provides a critical reference for understanding human-environment interactions in the Eurasian Steppe.