r/Anthropology

For more than 30 years, animal remains discovered during excavations at Ferriter's Cove, a small bay on the Dingle Peninsula in County Kerry, and dated to the end of the Mesolithic period (8000–4000 BC) have been cited as proof that, before agriculture became established in Ireland, there was contact between its Mesolithic hunter-gatherers and Europe's Neolithic farming communities.

Believed to be bone fragments belonging to cattle, the find is considered the earliest evidence for the presence of domesticated farm animals on the islands of Ireland and Britain.

Now, UCD researchers have shown the famous bones were never cattle at all but belonged to a bear and wild boar.

A repeatedly heated patch of clay, fire-damaged tools and locally rare pyrite form the earliest convincing archaeological case for deliberate fire-making, although no human remains identify the makers directly

Link to Paper: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.08.07.743438v1

Two leg bones dredged from the seafloor west of Taiwan are beginning to fill in the Denisovan silhouette. And, boy, are they revealing! According to a yet-to-be-peer-reviewed analysis of the remains, Denisovans were absolutely enormous by the standards of ancient humans.

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

Both were probably male, judging from their sizes, though the researchers could not determine their sex molecularly.

Both Denisovans would have been unusually large even beside Homo sapiens living in East Asia around the same time: a roughly 40,000-year-old modern human from Tianyuan, China, stood about 1.7 meters and weighed around 73 kilograms, the researchers mention in their study.

The genomic evidence also suggests some genetic contact with populations farther north. Although the Jomon show stronger overall ancestry associated with a southern migration route into East Asia, researchers detected a subtle genetic contribution from northern Upper Paleolithic Siberian groups.

This finding is broadly consistent with archaeological evidence showing similarities between blade-based stone technologies in prehistoric Japan and those found farther north in Eurasia.

The study also provides new insight into prehistoric population changes in Hokkaido. The researchers conclude that later Hokkaido Jomon were not direct descendants of the Upper Paleolithic inhabitants of the island.

Instead, genetic evidence supports a population replacement in which Jomon groups originating in Hondo—the main Japanese islands excluding Hokkaido—moved north during the Holocene.

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

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

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

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

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

An article on the Western tendency to romanticise Amazonian shamanism. It draws on John Urry's concept of the 'tourist gaze' and the work of anthropologists Alice Beck Kehoe and Evgenia Fotiou, who examine issues with how Westerners view indigenous shamanic cultures.