Cracking Teotihuacan: Researchers Try Reconstructed Ancient Language on a Silent City

Teotihuacan, a huge metropolis in central Mexico that peaked around A.D. 500 with perhaps 125,000 residents, left behind pyramids, murals, pottery — and a writing system scholars still can’t read. A new proposal by archaeologist Christophe Helmke and linguist Magnus Pharao Hansen at the University of Copenhagen argues that researchers have been matching the wrong language. Instead of Nahuatl, spoken by the later Aztecs, they compare Teotihuacan glyphs to a reconstructed Proto–Uto-Aztecan language closer in time to the city’s prime. They report promising matches for several symbols and say they’re confident in at least 18 readings. Other experts call the work exciting but unproven, noting the tiny surviving corpus: only about 300 known texts and less than 5 percent of the city excavated. (New York Times)

Subterranean shrine found in Italian cave system may rewrite underground ritual history

Archaeologists excavating the Pertosa-Auletta Caves in Salerno, Italy, say they’ve uncovered a Hellenistic cult area preserved along an underground watercourse. The karst cave network runs about 2.5 kilometers and shows human activity stretching back roughly 6,000 years. Earlier work revealed a Bronze Age pile dwelling on wooden stilts inside a subterranean chamber — one of the only known examples in Europe. This season’s fieldwork exposed new sections of that wooden structure plus a sacred zone dated to the 4th–1st centuries BCE. Researchers documented ritual deposits of amber, perfume vessels, figurines, coins, incense burners, and burned plant remains. They’re also sampling ancient wood to study prehistoric construction and cave environments, and developing standards for “speleological” (underground) archaeology. (Heritage Daily)

Two prehistoric settlements in Sweden trace 8,000 years of life on the same landscape

Archaeologists from Arkeologerna are reporting two prehistoric sites in Frillesås, Halland (southwest Sweden). One settlement, on a ridge near Frillesås Church, preserves longhouses, hearths, postholes, and pits dated broadly from the Late Bronze Age into the Early Iron Age, around 1100 BCE to the first centuries CE. Finds like pottery, burned clay, slag, and fire-cracked stone point to domestic activity alongside craft and metalworking. A second site on sandy ground near the coast preserves shallow hearths, stake holes, and small pits interpreted as a Mesolithic hunter-gatherer camp from roughly 8000–6000 BCE. Together, they map nearly 8,000 years of occupation, from mobile foragers on the coast to farming and metalworking communities inland. The digs are tied to rebuilding the E6 motorway after a 2023 landslide. (Heritage Daily)

Ancient gut health: DNA from Mexican paleofeces reveals pathogens and diet

Researchers have sequenced DNA from desiccated human paleofeces recovered in northern Mexico, some more than a thousand years old. Preserved by the dry cave environment, the samples were pulverized and screened for genetic traces of bacteria, parasites, and viruses. The team could also pick out plant and animal DNA, showing what people were eating. The work demonstrates how metagenomic analysis can reconstruct gastrointestinal stress, parasite loads, and diet in ancient communities without relying only on visible worm eggs or food scraps. Scientists say this approach can track how early farmers and foragers coped with hygiene, crowding, and changing foodways in the Americas, and how infection burden may have shaped daily life. (Archaeology)

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Ancient Japan’s Jomon people carried only faint Denisovan ancestry, genome study says

A new ancient DNA study analyzed genomes from Japan’s Jomon hunter-gatherers and found only a very small amount of Denisovan ancestry. Denisovans are an extinct branch of archaic humans known mainly from fossils in Siberia and the Himalaya region, and their DNA still lingers in many present-day populations across Asia and Oceania. By sequencing Jomon individuals, researchers estimated how much Denisovan signal reached the Japanese archipelago through ancient contact or migration. They conclude the gene flow was limited, challenging the idea that intensive Denisovan interbreeding happened everywhere in Ice Age and early Holocene East Asia. The findings sharpen models of how modern humans spread through coastal and island East Asia and formed distinct genetic identities. (Archaeology)

Archaeologists pull pregnancy hormones from centuries-old skeletons

For the first time, archaeologists have directly measured pregnancy-related hormones in human skeletal remains. A U.K. team powdered bone, tooth enamel and dentin, roots, and even ancient dental calculus from individuals who died between the first and nineteenth centuries CE. Using an adapted ELISA (enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay), they detected progesterone, estrogen, and testosterone in 74 samples. One woman known to have been pregnant at death showed elevated progesterone in bone and teeth. Women buried with infants had high progesterone in dental plaque but no detectable testosterone. The work suggests hormone spikes can mineralize into hard tissue, effectively turning skeletons into biochemical pregnancy records and letting researchers identify pregnancies at death in past populations. (Phys.org)

Iconic “earliest butchery” claim in Australia is under review

In the 1990s, a fossilized kangaroo bone from Australia made waves because shallow grooves along its surface were interpreted as 46,000-year-old cut marks — supposedly proof that the first Australians butchered large animals almost immediately after arriving on the continent. A new reassessment challenges that narrative. Researchers reexamined the bone with higher-resolution imaging and compared the grooves to traces made by trampling, sediment abrasion, and other natural processes. They conclude the markings can form without stone tools, casting doubt on the original “earliest butchery” headline. The team frames the result as a cautionary tale: single bones with ambiguous scratches shouldn’t, on their own, be used to rewrite when people first hunted megafauna in Australia. (Smithsonian)

A ‘pregnancy test for the dead’ could change bioarchaeology

Pregnancy almost never shows up in the archaeological record. Unless fetal remains survive in the same grave, researchers usually can’t tell if someone died while pregnant or postpartum. A new biochemical approach is changing that. Scientists recovered estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone from bones, teeth, and even ancient dental plaque belonging to people who lived as far back as the first century CE. Some women showed elevated progesterone and no detectable testosterone — a pattern consistent with pregnancy in living patients. Published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, the work effectively turns skeletons into endocrine time capsules. Anthropologists say this “pregnancy test for the dead” could finally let them ask social questions about fertility, labor, and maternal risk in past societies. (Anthropology)