Major archeology discoveries of 2024 include the preserved brain and a lost city

Grizzly details about ancient child sacrifice, a map of a lost city in the Amazon and the answer to a Stonehenge mystery are some of this year’s insights into human history.

The gone brain

Discovering a human brain at an archaeological site is more common than you might think. A new archive catalogs some 4,400 ancient brains that have been found dried, frozen or otherwise preserved (SN: 19.3.24). Brains may owe such surprising stability to their chemical composition.

A photograph of a preserved brain that is dark brown and orange and appears solid — This naturally preserved 1,000-year-old human brain of an individual excavated from a Belgian churchyard is still soft and moist and stained orange with iron oxides.Alexandra L. Morton-Hayward

Ancient arts and crafts

The oldest rock art in the Americas may be a group of cave paintings in Argentina dating back about 8,200 years (SN: 3/9/24, p. 16). This is several thousand years older than other rock art in the region. The nearly 900 paintings in a cave called Cueva Huenul 1 – which include geometric shapes plus figures of people and animals – may have helped preserve cultural knowledge across generations of hunter-gatherers.

A cave wall in Patagonia is covered with pictures of several large figures and shapes made of some kind of red cartoon material. Some of the art in this cave dates back as far as 8,200 years ago. — Hunter-gatherers in northwestern Patagonia, Argentina painted about 900 designs (some shown) in a cave over 130 generations, possibly to transmit cultural knowledge, researchers say.Guadalupe Romero Villanueva

Herder’s legacy

Yamnaya herders from southwest Asia rewrote the genetic history of Europe starting about 5,000 years ago, according to the DNA of more than 1,600 ancient humans (SN: 2/10/24, p. 14). Northern Europeans may have Yamnaya ancestry to thank for their taller stature and lighter skin, as well as their vulnerability to multiple sclerosis. Meanwhile, Eastern Europeans may have inherited a variant of the Yamnaya gene linked to Alzheimer’s disease.

A skull with an arrow shot through its nose appears on a black background. The Danish swamp skull, known as the Porsmos Man, dates back to around 4,600 years ago. — This Danish bog skull found with an arrow lodged in its nose dates to about 4,600 years ago, around the time when herding groups from Asia transformed the genetic profiles of Danes and other people across Europe.Danish National Museum

Egyptian ergonomics

Scroll bending influenced ancient Egyptian scribes (SN: 27.6.24). The skeletons of 30 scribes buried in the Abusir pyramid complex show signs of arthritis and other damage from poor posture.

A series of stone statues on a dark background depicting an ancient Egyptian scribe. — The high dignitary Nefer (shown with his wife in statues) was a scribe in ancient Abusir, Egypt. His skeleton and that of the other scribes show signs of wear and tear.Martin Frouz, Czech Institute of Egyptology/Charles University

The central Scottish part of Stonehenge

The mysterious Altar Stone at the heart of Stonehenge likely came from Scotland (SN: 14.8.24). Previously thought to share the Welsh origin of the other Stonehenge blocks, the stone closely matches the mineral composition of the Orcadian Basin, a Scottish rock formation.

A diagram of the location of the stones at Stonehenge shows the central location of the Altar Stone, in green, and the semicircular placement of the blue stones. — The age and chemical composition of the two Altarstone fragments (green) closely match a Scottish rock formation known as the Orcadian Basin. This is surprising because many other (blue) stones around the Altar Stone have Welsh roots.THAT Clarke *et al/Nature* 2024

Terrible, Terrible, No Good, Very Bad Day of Pompeii

Pompey’s infamous apocalypse was worse than thought. When Mount Vesuvius erupted in AD 79, it not only covered nearby cities in deadly hot gas, ash and rock — it also triggered deadly earthquakes, a study of collapsed buildings and crushed skeletons found.SN: 8/7/24).

A photo of a skeleton with broken bones in an excavated house in Pompeii, Italy. — Fractures of this skeleton suggest that the person was crushed by the house where he was sheltering when Mount Vesuvius erupted in AD 79. The explosion likely caused earthquakes that toppled the house.Pompeii Archaeological Park

Maya sacrifices without masks

Child sacrifices in a Maya burial chamber in the Yucatan Peninsula were all young boys, DNA shows, overturning a theory that women were sacrificed there in fertility rituals (SN: 6/12/24). The boys, sacrificed between 500 and 900 AD, may have been killed to appease a rain god.

image of the ancient Maya site of Chichén Itzá — The twin brothers and other related young boys were ritually sacrificed at Chichen Itza (a temple in the ancient Maya site, it is said).Johannes Krause

A lost city no more

Laser scans have revealed the earliest and largest known urban complex in the Amazon (SN: 1/11/24). Beneath the trees in Ecuador’s Upano Valley lie thousands of mounds that were once homes and community spaces, along with the remains of roads and farms. Inhabited from approximately 500 BC to 1500 AD, the city shows how sophisticated Amazonian civilizations were long before European conquest.

A laser scan of mountainous terrain in Ecuador shows the square footprints of old structures and lines that were once roads — Laser scans of several ancient sites (one shown) in the Upano Valley in Ecuador revealed the remains of buildings arranged around plazas and scattered along wide avenues.A. Dorison and S. Rostain

X marks the place

In a rare case of productive social media movement, a researcher has identified part of the alphabet of a lost civilization in a photo of an engraved plaque posted on X (SN: 24.6.24). Found in Spain, the slate is from the Tartessos civilization, which disappeared in the fifth century BC. The writing system is related to the Phoenician alphabet that gave shape to Latin, Spanish and English writing.

A close-up of the plaque with bold letters — An analysis of an ancient tile slab revealed inscribed letters (outlined in green), suggesting that artisans from Spain’s Tartessos culture carved an alphabet into the slab. Researchers plan to examine other fragments of the tablets in hopes of finding the missing letters.JFiJ/CSIC

Agriculture was not inevitable

A group of Stone Age hunter-gatherers known as the Iberomaurusians ate a mostly vegetarian diet of wild plants for millennia. And they did so without ever growing those plants as crops, according to an analysis of roughly 15,000-year-old human bones and teeth from a cave in Morocco (SN: 6/1/24, p. 14). These findings challenge the traditional idea that plant-based diets ultimately lead people to grow their own food.

View of the landscape from inside a cave in Morocco that archaeologists have excavated. You can see trenches in the foreground and some trees and a hill with some vegetation beyond. — An analysis of human remains unearthed from this Moroccan cave suggests that some late Stone Age hunter-gatherers had a largely plant-based diet. But they never domesticated the plants, the researchers say.Abdeljalil Bouzougar

The population boom idea is a failure

Contrary to popular belief, the early Polynesian settlers of Rapa Nui, otherwise known as Easter Island, may not have suffered a population boom that destroyed their civilization and the island’s environment. Ground surveys and satellite data suggest that Polynesian islanders who arrived about 800 years ago established a modest agricultural system and maintained a stable population of less than 4,000 until the arrival of Europeans 300 years ago (SN: 8/10/24, p. 14).

A line of Easter Island's famous stone statues face inland, with their backs to the ocean. — Rapa Nui’s famous stone statues watched over a population that could have reached about 3,900 individuals, too few people to cause a previously hypothesized ecological disaster, a study suggests.Chakarin Wattanamongkol/Getty Images

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