Philippa Kaur

A colder climate than we have now let ancient people cross the Bering land bridge and enter the AmericasGetty Images/iStockphoto
This is an extract from Our Human Story, our newsletter about the revolution in archaeology. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every month.
A central plot point in the human story is our species’ worldwide spread. From our homelands in Africa, our ancestors went to Europe, Asia, Australia and, eventually, to the Americas. The last continent they reached was South America (apart from Antarctica, but let’s not worry about that).
This is a curiously understudied chapter in our story. Huge amounts of research effort have gone into figuring out when and where humans first entered Europe, Asia and North America, but there’s been less attention to the first arrivals in South America.
That’s reflected in my own output: looking back through the archive of Our Human Story, I realised the last time I wrote in any depth about South America was June 2023.
However, that’s starting to change. On 15 May, Science published a massive genetic study of South Americans, which sheds a lot of light on the early peopling of the continent. It reveals a four-way split in the population as groups dispersed to different regions of the landmass. It also fits into an emerging story of extraordinary journeys – and the tremendous risks that were sometimes involved in moving to a new continent.

The long and winding road
If you know that Homo sapiens first evolved in Africa, and then look at a globe, it becomes apparent that getting to South America would be a significant undertaking. The vast span of the Atlantic Ocean lies between the two continents and was presumably an impassable barrier. So, humans ended up going the long way around.
Of course, it wasn’t a planned thing. Nobody back then knew South America even existed. People just kept wandering over the horizon to the next place. That took them out of Africa into south-west Asia, and from there to every corner of Eurasia. Some people even ended up in the far north-east of Asia, in the region we now call Chukotka in the Russian Far East.
From there, it was a relatively short hop to what we now call Alaska, in the far north-west of North America. Humans arrived there at least 16,000 years ago. Today, there is a sea crossing of about 82 kilometres, called the Bering Strait. But thousands of years ago the climate was colder and sea levels were lower, so more land was exposed – including an area called Beringia, linking Asia and North America. People may have simply walked across, without realising they were doing anything monumental.
In line with this, a study published in May found that horses regularly moved between North America and Asia via Beringia between 50,000 and 13,000 years ago. If horses could make this journey, people presumably could as well.
So did a species of bacteria that causes leprosy. In late May, we learned that Mycobacterium lepromatosis has been living and evolving in the Americas for almost 10,000 years.
Somehow, groups of the first Americans then made their way south. Some may have used boats to travel down the Pacific coast, while others went inland. Either way, people eventually found their way to the southernmost tip of South America.
These populations have left a rich archaeological record. A study published in February described a large collection of artefacts from the Tacuarembó Department of Uruguay from 10,000 to 11,000 years ago.
Who were these early South Americans? That’s where the new genetic analysis comes in.

On the move
Researchers led by Hie Lim Kim at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore compiled genomic data from 1537 people belonging to 139 ethnic groups. Some were from northern Eurasian populations potentially related to those who first entered the Americas, and some were from the Americas, including South America.
“We showed this humongous migration history,” says Kim.
Between 13,900 and 10,000 years ago, the first people in South America split into four groups with distinct genetic variants. All four genetic patterns can still be found in South Americans today.
It’s “very difficult” to come up with terms to describe this, says Kim. The study identifies genetic differences between populations, but these don’t necessarily correspond to cultural traits. “We didn’t define them as their culture or languages,” she says, but purely by ancestry.
With that caveat in mind, Kim’s team has labelled the four groups Amazonians, Andeans, Chaco Amerindians and Patagonians. The names relate to the regions where the genetic signals are strongest today. For example, the Amazonian ancestry is detectable today in people living in the Amazon rainforest, the Andean in the Andes mountain range, and the Patagonian in, well, Patagonia in southern Argentina. The Chaco Amerindian ancestry is today found in the Dry Chaco, a region spanning parts of Argentina, Bolivia and Paraguay. “They are hunter-gatherers living in the desert,” says Kim.
After the groups diverged, there is no sign of significant gene flow between them. It’s very possible that “they never met again”, says Kim. Geographical barriers like the Andes may have contributed to this isolation.
This almost certainly isn’t the full story, though, says Kim. There could well be more groups than just these four. “We have a very limited sample from Brazil,” she says, “And then there are still a lot of ethnic groups in the Amazon jungle.”
Other studies from the last few months hint at the richness of stories still to be uncovered. One, from March, looked at archaeological evidence from the “Southern Cone”: the region, south of the 22nd parallel, that includes the south of Brazil, Paraguay, Argentina, Chile and Uruguay. There, humans hunted large megafauna, such as giant ground sloths and giant armadillos called glyptodonts, for food and to make bone tools.
Another study published in March described how a people called the Guaraní made a huge journey across South America, travelling 2500 km from south-western Amazonia to south-eastern South America. After hundreds of years, they eventually reached the Río de la Plata estuary on the east coast, which today is the site of both Buenos Aires and Montevideo.
The most recent study, published in late May, highlights the dangers of moving to a new area. Ancient DNA from Colombia revealed a hitherto-unknown population of hunter-gatherers who lived on the Bogotá Altiplano, a plateau that is on average 2600 metres above sea level, around 6000 years ago. By 2000 years ago, they had been replaced by populations from Central America, and today there is no trace of their genetic makeup in any population that has been sampled – suggesting that, for some unknown reason, the group didn’t survive.
South America is a big place, and we’ve only just scratched the surface: there will be many, many more stories like these.

Topics:ancient humans More

Tutankhamun’s death mask, fashioned from gold and semi-precious stonesRosemary Calvert/Getty Images
A century ago this October, Egyptologist Howard Carter and his colleagues opened the innermost coffin of the pharaoh Tutankhamun’s sarcophagus for the first time in almost 3250 years. Inside they discovered the boy king’s mummy wearing an incredible mask fashioned from gold and semi-precious stones.
Tutankhamun’s fame today stems largely from the discovery of his tomb, which was filled with lavish goods – not only the magnificent funerary mask, but chariots, statues and even a dagger crafted using iron from a meteorite. In truth, though, he was a relatively insignificant pharaoh with, in turn, a presumably austere burial. That he was interred with such riches raises an intriguing question: What treasures might a truly important pharaoh have taken to their grave?

Carter wondered this, too. “How great must have been the wealth buried with those [other] ancient Pharaohs!” he would later write. Sadly, this is something we still don’t know for sure, as almost all other royal tombs were plundered and their grave goods lost.
But now, one Egyptologist has put forward a surprising explanation for the conundrum of the opulence of Tutankhamun’s interment. According to Peter Lacovara, thanks to an intriguing combination of factors, this obscure king’s tomb may actually be the richest of any pharaoh’s in ancient Egypt’s 3000-year-long existence. “Even King Khufu in the Great Pyramid of Giza would never have had anything approaching the quantity of material in Tutankhamun’s tomb,” he says.
Putting this idea to the ultimate test would require comparing the contents of Tutankhamun’s tomb with those of another pharaoh who reigned at about the same time. Remarkably, such a comparison might soon be possible: researchers could be poised to unearth an untouched royal tomb purportedly belonging to Tutankhamun’s great-great-great-great grandfather, Thutmose II.
It was on 28 October 1925 – three years after the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb – that Carter and his colleagues were finally ready to open the pharaoh’s solid-gold coffin. Carter was clearly impressed by the richly adorned mummy he found within. “Time… seemed to lose its common perspectives before a spectacle so vividly recalling the solemn religious rites of a vanished civilisation,” he wrote.
Howard Carter and his colleague examining Tutankhamun’s mummyIan Dagnall Computing/Alamy
All the same, it is easy to understand why Carter harboured suspicions that many other pharaohs had enjoyed even wealthier burials. Tutankhamun reigned for less than 10 years, dying in his teens before he could commission grand monuments or make his mark militarily. Nicholas Brown at Yale University says this means he “ranks down near the bottom of the list” of pharaohs in his particular branch of the royal family – known as the 18th dynasty, whose members ruled ancient Egypt from the mid-16th to the early 13th century BC. In line with this, he has one of the smallest tombs in the Valley of the Kings, near modern Luxor, measuring only about 110 square metres.
This is in stark contrast with the vast tombs of the kings known as the Ramessides, who reigned in the centuries after the 18th-dynasty pharaohs. The tomb of Ramesses III in the Valley of the Kings, for instance, has more than four times the footprint of Tutankhamun’s. However, Lacovara suggests that this tomb, despite its size, may never have contained as many grave goods as Tutankhamun’s.
Egyptology insights
Tombs like Ramesses III’s had grand entrances. “They were visibly on show,” says Lacovara, who is the director of The Ancient Egyptian Archaeology and Heritage Fund, a US-based non-profit organisation. He suspects this is because these tombs – unlike Tutankhamun’s – were designed to be visited, probably by priests who would continue to honour the pharaoh even in death. As such, he argues that these tombs were unlikely to have housed many treasures because they would have been an easy target for thieves; Tutankhamun’s treasure-filled tomb, meanwhile, was sealed and carefully hidden. “Certainly, the 18th-dynasty tombs were better hidden than their later Ramesside counterparts,” says Joann Fletcher at the University of York, UK.

Nevertheless, we know Carter was correct to suspect that many other royal tombs contained impressive artefacts. While most of those tombs were plundered in antiquity, a few escaped the attention of ancient robbers.
For instance, back in 1925 – just months before Carter and his colleagues opened Tutankhamun’s gold coffin – a team of researchers working in the shadow of the Great Pyramid of Giza discovered a cache of royal funerary treasures belonging to Queen Hetepheres, a 27th-century BC royal and Khufu’s mother.
Hetepheres’s treasures include finely made silver bracelets inlaid with royal blue lapis lazuli and a gold-covered box. “They are quite beautiful,” says Josef Wegner at the University of Pennsylvania.
Untouched mummies
Then there is an intact royal tomb discovered in northern Egypt in the late 1930s, containing the untouched mummies of three pharaohs from the 11th, 10th and 9th centuries BC. The solid-gold burial mask of one of these pharaohs – Psusennes I – bears a striking resemblance to the famous mask of Tutankhamun.
Treasures like these offer a priceless window into the artisanal skills and belief systems of ancient Egyptians. But they also suggest the objects from Tutankhamun’s tomb are among the finest the civilisation ever produced.
Take Tutankhamun’s iconic gold burial mask. A decade ago, Christian Eckmann and Katja Broschat at the Leibniz Centre for Archaeology in Germany and their colleagues, all specialists in ancient manufacturing techniques, were given the opportunity to study the artefact as part of a restoration project. The researchers, who published their findings in 2022, gained a deep appreciation of the work that went into the mask’s production. “The funerary mask of Tut is made of approximately 1230 individual pieces including inlays and attachments,” says Eckmann. In contrast, Psusennes I’s superficially similar mask “seems to be basically made of two pieces of sheet gold with only a few inlays for the eyes, eyebrows and so on”, he says.
“The artistic excellence reflected in Tutankhamun’s tomb is indeed a zenith,” says Piers Litherland, head of the New Kingdom Research Foundation, a UK-based archaeological research team. That, in part, reflects a broad trend in ancient Egyptian politics.

Down the centuries, ancient Egypt swung from periods of political stability and prosperity to periods of instability. The 18th-dynasty pharaohs ruled at the start of arguably the most stable and economically prosperous period of all, a golden age known as the New Kingdom. Exactly why the New Kingdom was so prosperous is still something of a mystery. In yet-to-be published work, Litherland and his colleagues have found evidence that the climate became wetter at the dawn of the New Kingdom, which might have made farming and hunting easier and provided an economic boost that helped the 18th-dynasty pharaohs become richer. Lacovara, however, is sceptical about this, and instead thinks the prosperity of the dynasty was due to the fact these pharaohs made wise trading decisions and had the good fortune to win territory after successfully battling their neighbours.
Either way, the dynasty reached the peak of its prosperity under the rule of Amenhotep III, Tutankhamun’s grandfather. At that point, the economy was strong enough to provide ample employment opportunities for artists and goldsmiths, explaining why the treasures in Tutankhamun’s tomb are so finely made. “The superb symmetry and refinement of his jewellery and statuary reflect the growing wealth of the dynasty,” says Litherland.

What treasures might a truly important pharaoh have taken to their grave?

But it isn’t just the quality of Tutankhamun’s treasures; it’s their quantity. Inside the young king’s tomb, Carter and his colleagues found about 5400 items. “It was crowded with objects,” says Lacovara.
The list of artefacts from his tomb offers some clues as to why he was buried with so much. It reveals, for instance, that there were several sumptuously decorated wooden beds and chairs.
There is general agreement among Egyptologists about why that was the case: “Tutankhamun had his own funerary furniture, but also a lot of other objects that seem to have been intended for the pharaohs who immediately preceded him,” says Lacovara. Such grave goods may have been kept from the tombs of those preceding pharaohs because those rulers were considered heretics. For most of ancient Egyptian history – up to and including the reign of Tutankhamun’s grandfather Amenhotep III – pharaohs were keen to acknowledge the state’s many gods by building great temples in their honour. But Tutankhamun’s father – the pharaoh Amenhotep IV, who later took the name Akhenaten – had a radically different approach. He closed many temples as part of his vision to replace the state’s traditional polytheistic faith with one based on the worship of the sun disc, represented by a single god: the Aten.
Religious revival
Akhenaten’s bold, monotheistic religious plan was, however, a failure. Atenism seems to have remained in place for just a couple of years after his death, an obscure period of ancient Egyptian history in which two more pharaohs may have briefly reigned before Tutankhamun ascended the throne, although we can’t say for sure because later ancient Egyptians tried to erase all records of Atenism from their history. When Tutankhamun became pharaoh as a young boy, his adult advisors evidently saw an opportunity to restore the traditional faith and reopen the temples. “In that sense, Tutankhamun really is a pivotal figure,” says Lacovara.
Earlier this year, Brown published a study in which he identified hints that Tutankhamun – or his advisors – actually invented some new ceremonies as part of this religious restoration, again demonstrating Tutankhamun’s importance. The evidence for this comes from four clay trays and wooden staves found in his tomb, which Brown thinks were the earliest example of a funerary ritual known as the Awakening of Osiris. The ritual is represented in ancient Egyptian artwork dating to several decades after Tutankhamun’s reign.
The outcome was that, when the young pharaoh died in the ninth year of his reign, the traditional polytheistic religion was securely back in place. At that point, a decision seems to have been made to bury Tutankhamun not just with his own personal possessions, but with those of his out-of-favour, Aten-worshiping predecessors. We can see evidence of this in photos from Carter’s excavations a century ago: Tutankhamun’s tomb contained multiple sets of the same elaborate grave goods stacked side by side, giving it the appearance of a well-stocked department store.
Tutankhamun’s tomb conundrum
Exactly why that decision was made is unclear. Some researchers, such as Fletcher, have suggested that the treasures of the Aten-worshippers were considered tainted, so they were buried with Tutankhamun to get rid of them. Brown thinks an alternative is possible: that Tutankhamun was buried with so much treasure as a mark of gratitude for his role in restoring the traditional faith. This might help explain why his tomb contains heavily gilded statues that, going on the evidence of the later pharaoh Horemheb’s tomb, were usually given a simpler, black-resin finish, says Brown. “The amount of gold in Tutankhamun’s tomb is a conundrum,” he says.
A golden chariot, one of the six found in Tutankhamun’s tombCredit: The Print Collector /Alamy
Whatever the explanation, says Lacovara, the main message is clear: Tutankhamun had an unusual funeral because he wasn’t simply buried with grave goods fit for a king, but with grave goods fit for several kings. “I don’t know that there’s anything more out there that would add to this,” he says. But there may, in fact, be a way to further strengthen the case.
Earlier this year, Litherland and his colleagues unearthed an ancient Egyptian royal tomb belonging to Thutmose II, Tutankhamun’s great-great-great-great grandfather. Like Tutankhamun, Thutmose II was an 18th-dynasty pharaoh – but his reign came early in the dynasty, before it had reached its economic and artistic peak. As such, Litherland speculates it is likely that the treasures Thutmose II was buried with were modest compared with Tutankhamun’s. Sadly, we can’t say for sure because the tomb was found empty.
However, Litherland suspects that Thutmose II’s tomb was barren because its contents were moved to a new location by the ancient Egyptian authorities, possibly because the tomb flooded shortly after Thutmose II’s interment. This would explain why there was no tell-tale evidence that grave robbers had plundered the tomb – no bundles of linen bandages, broken mummy remains or smashed clay vessels.
Undiscovered riches?
“The burial had to be moved somewhere,” says Litherland – and he thinks he knows where that is. Close to the empty tomb, he and his colleagues have discovered an enormous debris pile, including layers of human-made mud plaster, which they think conceals the entrance to a second tomb into which the king and his treasures were moved – and where they may remain even today. The researchers will resume their search for this hypothetical untouched tomb later this year.
“My expectation, if we find the tomb, is that we will find a much smaller range of objects than were found in Tutankhamun’s tomb, and that the artistry will be, in some cases, cruder,” says Litherland.
Lacovara agrees. “Even when it was intact… the grave goods it contained would be much less lavish and far smaller in number than those found in the tomb of Tutankhamun,” he says. However, he doubts Litherland will make such a discovery. “I’m afraid there is no chance of finding an intact tomb for Thutmose II,” says Lacovara. This is because Thutmose II’s mummy seems to have already been found among a stash of royal mummies in a tomb near the Valley of the Kings, apparently moved there for safekeeping by the ancient Egyptians. One of these mummies was labelled as being that of Thutmose II, though Litherland suspects it isn’t – particularly since it belonged to a man who died at about 30 years of age, when many suspect that Thutmose II died in his late teens or early 20s.
But even without clues from Thutmose II’s tomb, the evidence points to Carter being luckier than he realised, says Lacovara, to have stumbled across possibly the most spectacularly stocked royal burial in ancient Egypt’s sprawling existence.
“It’s an incredibly wealthy tomb,” he says. “And it’s a miracle that it survived more or less intact.”

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As technology progressed, humans also got better at passing on skills to othersEnglish Heritage/Heritage Images/Getty Images
An analysis of more than 3 million years of human evolution shows that communication and technology developed in lockstep. As ancient humans came up with more advanced stone tools and other technologies, they also improved their communication and teaching skills, in order to pass their newfound abilities onto the next generation – and this enabled more technological progress.
“We have a scenario for the evolution of the mode of cultural transmission in human evolution,” says Francesco d’Errico at the University of Bordeaux in France. “It appears to be a co-evolution, between the complexity of the cultural trait and the complexity in the mode of cultural transmission.”

One distinctive feature of humans is that we have developed increasingly complex tools and behaviours. For instance, ancient humans created sharp stones that could be used for stabbing and cutting, then attached them to wooden sticks to create spears – a technique known as hafting.
Crucially, we can tell other people how to perform these behaviours. In the most complex cases, like playing the violin or programming a computer, this can involve years of teaching and practice. But in the distant past we weren’t as good at passing on information – especially before complex language arose.
With Ivan Colagè at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome, Italy, d’Errico set out to track how our ability to transmit cultural information has developed over the past 3.3 million years, alongside our changing behaviours and technologies. They tracked 103 cultural traits, including specific types of stone tool, ornaments such as beads, pigments and mortuary practices such as burials and building cairns. They identified when each trait first appeared regularly in the archaeological record, suggesting it was common practice.
The pair also assessed how difficult each trait was to learn. Some, such as stone hammers, are pretty simple. “You don’t need that much explanation,” says d’Errico. However, the manufacture of more complex tools might need to be demonstrated, and the most complex behaviours – especially things like burial that have profound religious significance – require explicit verbal explanations.
To break this down, d’Errico and Colagè looked at three aspects of learning. First, spatial: can you learn the skill by watching from a distance, or do you need to be close enough to touch? Second, temporal: is one short lesson enough, or do you need multiple sessions, perhaps focusing on different steps? And third, social: who learns from whom?
The pair assessed all the traits themselves and also asked a panel of 24 experts for their assessments. They largely agreed. “We think that the answers are relatively robust,” says d’Errico.

The new work suggests there were two major shifts in cultural transmission. First, around 600,000 years ago, ancient humans were overtly teaching each other, although not necessarily using spoken instructions: gestures may have been enough. That is well before the origin of our species, Homo sapiens, and coincides with the emergence of hafting.
Then, between 200,000 and 100,000 years ago, humans developed modern language. This was necessary because they were performing behaviours like burials. “This involves many different steps, and also you have to explain why you do that,” says d’Errico.
“The link between cultural transmission and cultural complexity is robust,” says Ceri Shipton at University College London. He adds that, while there is much uncertainty about when humans developed language, the new estimate is “a reasonable timeframe”.

Topics:human evolution/ancient humans More

The Isaiah Dead Sea Scroll is thought to date to around 100 BCZev Radovan/Alamy
Some of the Dead Sea Scrolls may be up to a century older than previously thought, potentially revising our understanding of how these ancient texts were produced.
This new assessment, based on AI analysis of handwriting and modern radiocarbon dating techniques, even suggests that a few scrolls – like those containing the biblical books Daniel and Ecclesiastes – may be copies made during the lifetimes of the books’ original authors, says Mladen Popović at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. More

Tutankhamun: The Immersive Exhibition.
The vogue for immersive shows is starting to feel stale, so when I gave in to my son’s pleas to visit Tutankhamun: The immersive exhibition in London, it was with a sense of foreboding.
I needn’t have worried.
First up were replicas of items like Tutankhamun’s famous death mask and sarcophagus, plus some real artefacts on loan, which excited my son. Then on to the immersive part, where, in familiar style, projections on the walls, floor and ceilings were designed to draw us in as we ventured down the Nile and into the tomb.
Much better was the virtual reality room, where, headsets on, we embodied the young king on his journey from tomb to afterlife. But my favourite room let me “become” archaeologist Howard Carter and explore his camp in the 1920s.
It’s gimmicky, sure, but also hugely imaginative and informative. While the detail was probably lost on my 6-year-old daughter, she got swept along by the exhibition, whose immersive elements really bring the subject (back) to life.

Article amended on 5 June 2025We corrected the name of archaeologist Howard Carter.  Topics:exhibition/ancient humans More

Leprosy can be caused by two species of bacteria, Mycobacterium leprae or Mycobacterium lepromatosisnobeastsofierce Science/Alamy
A form of leprosy affected people in the Americas long before the arrival of Europeans, contrary to popular belief.
“The narrative around leprosy has been always been that it’s this awful disease that Europeans brought to America,” says Nicolàs Rascovan at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. “Well, our discovery changes that.”
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The vast majority of leprosy cases worldwide are caused by the bacterium Mycobacterium leprae. But in 2008, Xiang-Yang Han at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and his colleagues discovered a second causative agent, M. lepromatosis, in two people from Mexico who had leprosy. Since then, scientists have found more cases of this pathogen in the US, Canada, Brazil and Cuba – as well as in four people in Singapore and Myanmar.
Wanting to know more about this understudied pathogen, Rascovan teamed up with Han and other researchers, as well as Indigenous communities, to analyse ancient DNA from 389 people who lived in the Americas before European contact.
They found M. lepromatosis in the remains of one person near the Alaska-Canada border and two others along the south-eastern coast of Argentina, all carbon-dated to about 1000 years ago. The bacteria’s genomes varied slightly, hinting at distinct strains separated by around 12,000 kilometres. “It spread so fast, on a continental level, in just a matter of centuries,” says Rascovan.
DNA from dozens of modern cases – mostly from the US and Mexico – revealed that nearly all contemporary strains are essentially clones, showing only minor changes since ancient times. But the team also identified one rare and unusually ancient strain in a modern person that hadn’t turned up in archaeological remains, suggesting that at least two distinct lineages of M. lepromatosis are still infecting people in North America today – alongside the M. leprae strains introduced by Europeans.
Combined, the analyses suggest that the bacteria have been branching out and evolving in the Americas for nearly 10,000 years. About 3000 years ago, one line of the pathogen mutated into a form that now infects red squirrels in the UK and Ireland – leading to problems like swollen skin and crusty lesions.
As for its origins, genetic data show that M. lepromatosis and M. leprae split from a common ancestor more than 700,000 years ago, although where in the world that divergence happened remains unknown.
Modern cases of M. lepromatosis seem to affect the blood vessels, especially in the legs and feet – unlike M. leprae, which mainly attacks the nerves, says Han. In some people carrying M. lepromatosis, the blood flow gets blocked, causing the skin to die and break down. That can lead to deadly complications, including severe secondary infections by bacteria like Staphylococcus aureus. This disease can also spread beyond the skin, turning up in organs like the liver and spleen. Consequently, some people die before their bones have time to show any signs of leprosy.

That could help explain why archaeologists hadn’t identified leprosy in ancient remains from the Americas, says Han. While skeletons in Europe and Asia often show classic signs of bone damage from leprosy, the ancient individual from Canada in this study had only vague jaw lesions that could be caused by many conditions – and the two skeletons from Argentina showed no signs of leprosy at all.
Annemieke Geluk at Leiden University in The Netherlands says this “beautiful study” has forced a rethinking of the disease’s history. “My teaching slides state that there was no leprosy in the Americas before Europeans colonised it,” she says. “Now I have to update my slides!”
Beyond that historical significance, the research also sheds lights on a pressing public health issue. Leprosy is re-emerging in parts of the world, she says, and rising antimicrobial resistance could make it harder to treat. “Surveillance is very important,” says Geluk. “We need a global effort to map what strains are out there.”

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Archaeologists excavate part of the medieval wall system in MongoliaTal Rogovski
Long before the Great Wall of China was constructed, other monumental walls were built across the Eurasian steppes – but they weren’t designed to defend against Mongol armies. Recent excavations reveal that they were erected to control movement of people or demonstrate power, much like border walls today.
The Great Wall of China spans many thousands of kilometres, the longest stretch running some 8850 kilometres. This part dates from the Ming dynasty (AD 1368 to 1644) and served as a physical barrier to defend against Mongol raids.
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Unlike the Great Wall, which is – as the name implies – made up of large walls, the earlier system is a network of trenches, walls and enclosures stretching approximately 4000 kilometres across more northerly regions in China, Mongolia and Russia.
It was built between the 10th and 12th centuries by several dynasties, chiefly the Jin dynasty (AD 1115 to 1234), which was founded by Jurchen people from Siberia and north-east China, who were mainly pastoralists.
Gideon Shelach-Lavi at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and his colleagues had already surveyed and mapped the walls using satellite imagery and drones, but now they have studied a section running for 405 kilometres through what is now Mongolia and excavated at one of the enclosures.
The structures were made up of a ditch about 1 metre deep and 3 metres wide, with the earth from it piled up on one side, creating a wall of compressed earth that may have been a metre or two tall. Then, every few kilometres along the wall, there was a thick, square, stone enclosure, about 30 metres across.
What the walls were built for hasn’t been clear. There is very little historical documentation about them and they weren’t built at natural geographic borders, says Shelach-Lavi.
Many historians thought they were built to stop the armies of Genghis Khan, who ruled the Mongol Empire from 1206 until 1227, says Shelach-Lavi.
The structures wouldn’t have been particularly effective defensively, though. “This was not meant to stop invading armies,” says Shelach-Lavi.
Instead, he suggests it was more of a show of power – to demonstrate that the area was under the control of the Jin dynasty. The wall would also have funnelled people through gates at the enclosures, so the flow of people, goods and animals could be managed. It might also have been used to prevent small raids, even if not stopping armies, he says.
“The idea, I think, is to channel those people to where you have those enclosures, so you can control them, you can tax them,” he says. “It’s a matter of controlling who is moving, and in this respect, it’s not very different from what we see today.”

Finds at the enclosure also shed light on how the people there may have lived. “This is a pastoralist area,” says Shelach-Lavi. “We find a lot of evidence in the region of people living off herding and hunting and fishing.”
And yet, at the enclosure, the researchers found coins from the Han Chinese Song dynasty, which was at war with the Jin dynasty, as well as ceramics, a plough head and a stone platform or bench that could be heated and used as a stove or bed.
This implies that significant resources were invested into the garrison’s construction and maintenance, says Shelach-Lavi, and also that the people lived here all year round and practised agriculture. “That’s surprising because even today, they don’t do agriculture in this place,” he says.

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