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When did humans first reach the Americas? Scientists are still battling over the truth
Research into when, how and why humans migrated into the American continents many thousands of years ago is challenging and contentious – and a recent study might have added to the complexity
For decades, the story of the arrival of the first humans in the Americas – and the uncertainty around it – has been tied to one small site in the mountains of Chile: Monte Verde. Before the discovery of Monte Verde 50 years ago, it had long been believed that the first humans reached the American continents from the far north, then travelled south through the Americas, about 13,000 years ago. Remains found at Monte Verde overturned that conclusion. Radiocarbon dating concluded that the evidence of human settlement there – wooden hut foundations, footprints and tools – were about 14,500 years old. This upended the previous narrative, suggesting humans had arrived into the Americas much earlier than had been thought. Now, a new development has twisted that narrative once more, adding to the mythology, and confusion, around Monte Verde – and the deep human past of the Americas. A controversial study published in the journal Science has concluded the remains were not, in fact, as old as had been thought – lending credence to the original theories all over again. In many ways, the findings leave us less certain than before, and beg a fundamental question: why do we still not know for certain when humans first arrived in the Americas? Human migration into the Americas When looking back at the story of how humanity spread across the world, a few things are relatively certain. Homo sapiens first emerged in Africa, and seem to have successfully left the continent in significant numbers about 60,000 years ago. They migrated first to Asia and Oceania, and then Europe. The question of when – and indeed how – our ancestors first made landfall in the Americas has always been much more open, however, despite the migration being much more recent. Huge leaps forward in our understanding were made with discoveries in two locations in New Mexico in the early part of the last century. First, almost 100 years ago, excavations near the village of Folsom found the fluted tip of a spear was found between the ribs of an ancient bison believed to have lived about 12,500 years ago. Read more | Think men were always the hunters? Stone Age women took down mammoths too Then, in the 1930s, further similar spear tips were found near the city of Clovis, which were believed to be a few hundred years older than the previous find. From then on, the so-called Clovis people were believed to be among the first in the Americas, and the Clovis-first theory was born. It therefore followed that the migration into the Americas must have taken place at the end of the last Ice Age, when a land bridge opened between Asia and North America, in an area named Beringia, where the Bering Strait is now located (and is now mostly underwater). The Clovis-first theory held – until 1976, when Monte Verde entered the equation. The discovery of Monte Verde The site is located next to a creek in a mountainous, forested area near the town of Puerto Montt, some 500 miles south of Chile’s capital, Santiago. When logging in the 1970s led to land erosion in the area, its archaeological significance became clear. Monte Verde had been home to hunter-gatherers, who left behind the remnants of plants, tools, spears, wood and other artefacts. They were found to pre-date Clovis, and the findings shook the archaeological world. If humans were this far south 14,500 years ago, when did they enter the Americas at the north? Or did they? Could they maybe have arrived by boat from the south instead? Or maybe they weren’t that far south 14,500 years ago, after all. That is the new theory put forward in the new Science study, which concludes that the remains are, at most, only 8,200 years old. “With colonization no longer anchored by Monte Verde, our revised chronology supports a more recent date of human arrival to South America,” the authors say. They suggest that some of the items at Monte Verde, such as Ice Age wood, had been deposited there by the creek, contaminating the site and giving the impression it is older than it really is. “It’s going to be a really interesting debate over the next few months and years,” one archaeologist not involved in the research told National Geographic. “It’ll be a firestorm.” That firestorm has already taken hold, with some archaeological scientists disputing the validity of the story. One told LiveScience that the paper showed examples of “egregiously poor geological work” and dismissed the findings. How the new research complicates the picture So do we now know even less about the migration to the Americas than we used to? For some of the experts in the field, the answer seems to be… maybe. For those who previously worked at Monte Verde, and are committed to its original dating, the answer is a clear “No”. “I would say don’t put that much stock in the recent Monte Verde critique, as it is problematic on many levels,” says Professor David Meltzer, an archaeologist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, who led an expedition to the site in 1997. The new research adds to the competing theories, and Meltzer knows the full picture may never emerge – even if he feels there is growing evidence of other pre-Clovis peoples across the Americas. “We will never get a definitive answer, of course, for we will never find the very first Americans, or, if we did, recognise that we had,” he says. “But we are homing in on the window in which it likely took place. That’s about the best we can hope for: an ever-narrowing window.” Listen now | The history of migration: everything you wanted to know Finding conclusive evidence of the first people in the Americas is unlikely for a number of reasons: their numbers were likely extremely small, and the continents are enormous. Any evidence would have to have been well preserved, too: it is only by chance that Monte Verde became caked in a layer of peat that helped protect it. But just as the “when” may never be fully answered with near certainty, the “why” humans travelled to the Americas may too remain a mystery. “To me it is a very interesting factor, but one that will be difficult to nail down,” says Meltzer. “It is hard enough to figure out motives with living humans and why they do what they do, but even tougher for people who lived so long ago and whose culture or cultures were so very different from our own. And for some it could be one thing, for others multiple factors.” Writing in his book The Human Past, Meltzer suggests a few possible reasons for the migration: those humans may have been looking for more resources, or a better climate, for example. “People seeking new lands did not have to be right about what they might find, in order to go looking for it,” he writes. But maybe, he says, there was another factor behind them arriving in the Americas, one that is mirrored in the ongoing discussions about Monte Verde: these humans may just have been curious, and enjoyed discovering something new.
40,000 years ago, our ancestors left these strange symbols behind. What do they really mean?
Research has unveiled a 43,000-year-old system of symbols – but is it evidence of a forerunner of writing systems, or something altogether different?
Writing is a tool for documenting ideas and events, and its invention transformed human history. It’s widely accepted that this world-changing technology was invented independently in at least four places: Mesopotamia, Egypt, China and Mesoamerica. Of these four great centres of innovation, it was in Mesopotamia and Egypt that the technology first emerged. Both ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs and Mesopotamian cuneiform are roughly 5,200 years old. Thanks to archaeology, it’s also possible to trace the technological innovations that preceded writing, eventually evolving into it. In Mesopotamia, about 9,500 years ago, traders were using small lumps of clay as numerical tokens to help calculate the value of goods. They soon began encapsulating these tokens in hollow clay balls, perhaps to signify trade transactions that were considered settled and permanent. These clay balls were opaque, so administrators made impressions on the outer surface to represent the tokens held inside. An important third step occurred roughly 5,500 years ago, when traders dispensed entirely with the tokens and flattened out the clay balls. These were still marked with impressions representing the now-abandoned tokens, producing the first clay tablets bearing symbols – a clear forerunner of cuneiform: the world's oldest writing system, marked onto clay tablets. All the steps in this technological journey took place within the past 10,000 years. But in early 2026, one team of researchers made a striking claim. According to them, there is evidence that humans associated with the Aurignacian culture (which existed in Palaeolithic Europe between around 43,000 and 26,000 years ago) developed a system of signs and markings that shared features in common with a forerunner of cuneiform writing. The announcement was interpreted by some as proof that the roots of writing are far older than had been thought – by an order of tens of thousands of years. A Stone Age script? Archaeologists have known for a century that the Aurignacians carved marks onto the surface of bones and small figurines. These marks include rows of dots or crosses. They were clearly intentionally made, but no one had taken the trouble to seriously analyse and interpret them, says Christian Bentz, a computational linguist at Saarland University in Germany. He and his colleague, archaeologist Ewa Dutkiewicz at the Berlin State Museums in Germany, have now performed such an analysis. The two researchers focused in particular on the potential for the marks to encode information. Essentially, this involves measuring the degree of variety in a sequence of marks: a row of identical crosses has little potential to convey information, but a row containing different symbols could be information dense. This is why a string of alphabetic symbols (like this sentence, or any word) can convey a complex message. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/Screenshot-2026-04-17-at-13.57.09-aa36546-e1776430775976.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="This ivory plaque, known as the 'Adorant' from Geißenklösterle Cave in the Ach Valley shows a human figure with lion features on one side and rows of dots example on the other. It is 40,000 years old.(Photo by University of Tübingen / Hildegard Jensen)" title="Screenshot 2026-04-17 at 13.57.09" /> Bentz and Dutkiewicz compared the marks on the Aurignacian objects to 5,500-year-old Mesopotamian inscriptions written using a forerunner of cuneiform known as proto-cuneiform. To their surprise, they discovered that both the Aurignacian markings and proto-cuneiform had a similar information-carrying potential. “I couldn’t believe it,” says Bentz, speaking to HistoryExtra. “I thought I must have messed up the analysis somehow.” But even after checking and rechecking the results, the finding stood. That comparison is sound, according to linguistic anthropologist Piers Kelly at the University of New England in Australia. But this isn’t because the Aurignacians had developed a Stone Age script; it’s because the proto-cuneiform inscriptions can hardly be considered writing at all. Proto-cuneiform clearly resembles writing, particularly since it was produced using the tools – a stylus and clay tablet – we associate with Mesopotamian cuneiform. But the information it encodes is very basic, because the earliest versions of proto-cuneiform employed a very limited number of distinct signs, representing a restricted set of ideas. Read more | 'Green-eyed monster' and 'stiff upper lip’: the evolution of the English language Proto-cuneiform only developed a much richer “dictionary” of signs by about 5,200 years ago, and it was then that it had the potential to store more information. Indeed, Bentz and Dutkiewicz’s analysis confirms this, showing that later proto-cuneiform inscriptions have a far greater information-carrying potential than the Aurignacian marks. “It can look as if there is a neat continuity between [the early and late proto-cuneiform inscriptions],” says Kelly, speaking to HistoryExtra. “But they are categorically different systems.” Cuneiform is writing, proto-cuneiform isn’t, says Kelly. He, and many other scholars, prefer not to label any of the proto-cuneiform inscriptions (even the later, richer proto-cuneiform examples) with the W-word. Writing, says Kelly, is a system for encoding linguistic information – in simple terms, a tool for recording speech. This means writing involves assigning specific sound values to signs. Proto-cuneiform never did this. Its sign for “sheep” – a cross inside a circle – tells us nothing about how ancient Mesopotamians voiced the word “sheep”. In fact, it wasn’t until about 4,900 years ago that Mesopotamians began encoding speech with writing, repurposing signs to represent spoken syllables. This, according to Kelly, is when writing was actually invented in the region. “The various notational systems that preceded and influenced this innovation were simply part of the symbolic raw material that made writing possible,” he says. In other words, the Aurignacian artefacts don’t necessarily show us that writing has roots stretching back 43,000 years. They only show us that humans were iteratively experimenting with the technologies that would allow for the invention of writing, tens of thousands of years later. Searching for meaning in the Stone Age But why were humans experimenting with signs 43,000 years ago? “It is generally accepted that the signs have a communication function,” says archaeologist April Nowell at the University of Victoria in Canada, speaking to HistoryExtra about the research. “We have known for a long time that they are not random.” However, not everyone is convinced by this idea. Archaeologist Silvia Ferrara at the University of Bologna in Italy and her colleagues recently published an analysis of even older marks, these produced by members of our species in southern Africa roughly 65,000 years ago. The marks in question include parallel lines or crosshatched grids, carefully scratched into the surface of ostrich eggshell fragments. Speaking to HistoryExtra, Ferrara says the analysis deliberately avoided making any assumptions about the purpose of those marks, instead merely exploring the cognitive behaviours that allowed humans to produce them in the first place. “Writing was not part of the picture,” she says. The suggestion is that humans began intentionally producing marks on objects long before they began assigning any communicative meaning to those marks. Predictably, these ideas complicate our understanding of the Aurignacian marks. While Bentz and Dutkiewicz showed they had the potential to store information, that doesn’t mean they actually did. “I’m not convinced they have the same kind of information content as the proto-cuneiform signs, for which we can often assign definite meanings,” says computational linguist Richard Sproat at Sakana.ai in Japan, commenting on the research to HistoryExtra. And, there is one more factor to consider, says Kelly. From our modern perspective, writing often serves as a substitute for speech, conveying every detail of a message. But non-writing sign systems are more complex. For instance, indigenous Australians have long made use of a communication device known as the message stick – typically a length of wood engraved with a series of marks. But, says Kelly, the message stick is just one element in the communication process. “Message stick communication is highly multimodal involving spoken language, gesture and body paint,” he says. “As such, message sticks can be thought of as an almost supplementary prop within a multi-channel communicative routine.” They cannot be understood in isolation. This doesn’t mean that the Aurignacian artefacts, and the marks they carried, were part of a similarly elaborate multi-channel communication system. But it does serve as a reminder that we might be missing important context that could help us understand how – if at all – the artefacts helped convey a message. “Anthropologists have always championed the importance of ‘being there’ as an active participant-observer in the communities they want to understand,” says Kelly. Because it’s impossible for archaeologists to “be there” with the Aurignacians, we may never work out how they used the artefacts they left behind.
For decades, this prehistoric grave was a mystery. Have its dark secrets now been revealed?
Devastating illness wiped out a community in Iron Age Serbia – or so it was thought. New research suggests the real story behind a large prehistoric burial site might be much darker
As Europe progressed into the early Iron Age, it marked the beginning of a new chapter in prehistory. The Iron Age in Europe began roughly around 900 BC, when iron tools and weapons began to replace those made from bronze. The transition brought technological change, accompanied by major shifts in social organisation. Clan-based communities that had long relied on mixed economies of farming, herding and seasonal mobility began to organise themselves into static chiefdoms organised around powerful leaders. Settlements grew larger, and trade networks expanded across the continent, opening up new opportunities for cultural and economic exchange. It was a change that created new ways of living – and new ways of dying, too. Read more | A brief guide to the British Iron Age Across central and south-eastern Europe, landscapes appear to have been increasingly contested as communities vied for access to new trade routes and fertile land, clashing over opposing ideas, beliefs, territorial needs and resources. In some cases, these disputes descended into violent conflict. Archaeological evidence from this period includes fortified hilltop settlements, weapon deposits and graves showing signs of trauma, all suggesting that warfare and organised violence were becoming more common in parts of Iron Age Europe. The Carpathian Basin of south-eastern Europe – the vast region spanning parts of modern Hungary, Serbia, Croatia and Romania – forms a natural crossroads between central Europe, the Balkans and the eastern Mediterranean, making it an important corridor for trade, migration and cultural exchange during the prehistoric period. It was one of these dangerous zones of violent change. It was in this region, in 1954, that archaeologists first uncovered a site called Gomolava along the banks of the Sava River in northern Serbia, which dates to the earliest years of the Iron Age, around 2,800 years ago. Gomolava is a large archaeological mound known as a tell – a mound formed by centuries of repeated building in the same location. When archaeologists excavated the site in 1971, they found evidence of a mass burial that dated to this early Iron Age period of flux. New bioarchaeological research conducted on the human remains has revealed a plethora of unsettling mysteries. The mysterious mass grave at Gomolava Inside the burial – a shallow circular pit just three metres wide – were the remains of 77 humans. The bodies had been carefully placed together, and more than half of them were children under the age of 12. The grave appeared to represent the aftermath of a catastrophe such as disease or famine – something that might explain the disproportionate number of the young. Mass burials in archaeological contexts are often initially interpreted as the result of epidemics, starvation events or natural disasters, particularly when many children are present. But a new analysis of the skeletons, published in Nature Human Behaviour, paints a decidedly more disturbing picture. A team led by archaeologists and bioarchaeologists from several European institutions re-examined the bones, which have been stored for decades at the Museum of Vojvodina in Novi Sad, Serbia. Their initial expectation was to confirm the original interpretation: that this was a community burial following an epidemic. Instead, they found signs of extraordinary and calculated violence. Roughly one in five individuals displayed clear trauma injuries, including fractured skulls, cuts made by bladed weapons and damage consistent with arrow strikes. Because many lethal injuries – particularly those affecting soft tissue, such as cuts to the throat – leave no marks on bone, the researchers believe the true number of victims who died violently was probably far higher. The team concluded that the entire group had likely been deliberately killed. The first obvious question was: why? Rather than offering answers, further genetic testing only deepened the mystery. Apart from one mother buried with her two daughters, the individuals in the grave were not closely related to each other. Isotope analysis of their teeth – which preserves chemical signals from childhood diet and environment – revealed that many of them had grown up in different regions and eaten different kinds of food. The victims weren’t members of a single family group, or village. Instead, they appear to have come from multiple communities across a wider region – but they all died and were buried together in the same place. The burial also contained personal ornaments including brooches, bracelets and rings, suggesting the bodies hadn’t been looted. Unexpected animal bones found within the grave also hint that the burial may have involved offerings or feasting rituals (animal remains placed alongside human burials are often interpreted by archaeologists as evidence of ritual activity connected with death and commemoration). The final mystery offered by analysis of the mass burial was that this violence was targeted at women and girls. In total, over 60 per cent of the victims were children and, more than 70 per cent were female. Read more | Think men were always the hunters? Stone Age women took down mammoths too The picture that the archaeologists were uncovering began to look like a deliberate, possibly ritualistic, mass killing of women and children originating from the wider region. But what would that mean? And what, if anything, can it tell us about broader Iron Age societies? To begin answering these questions, it helps to place the findings within wider archaeological debates. Speaking to HistoryExtra about the research, Professor Penny Bickle, an expert in funerary archaeology at the University of York, says that it’s important to resist looking for single, decisive answers. She situates the findings within a broader shift in how archaeologists understand violence in prehistory. “In the past archaeologists have debated how violent prehistory was in depth, but had a tendency to treat violence as an either/or scenario. Either prehistory was totally peaceful and harmonious or violent and dangerous. Over recent years, as a discipline we've come to understand that this binary is not very helpful. Violence is present in all societies, and the interesting questions are: when and why did it take place, and who was it targeted at?” Power, symbolism and the limits of the evidence One possible way to interpret the evidence is through the lens of power and display. The researchers themselves note that the victims in the burial were most likely deliberately selected. Instead of killing enemy warriors – the most immediate threat – the perpetrators targeted women and children: the people who, in a biological sense, would represent the future of their communities. Professor Bickle confirms that this is certainly noteworthy. She points out how unusual the demographic profile of the burial is compared to other mass graves: “Often in cases of mass burial, young women are less well represented, but there are a mix of genders and age. The mass burial at Gomolava does stand out as the deliberate targeting of females.” One interpretation of the killing of these people, then, could be that this was a carefully orchestrated public display of dominance and power by one group over other regional groups by the symbolic killing of their women and children. The implication from whoever led the killing may have been: ‘during this period of change, we’re in charge’. Adding to this idea is that the burial itself sits atop a prominent settlement mound that overlooks the surrounding landscape. It’s a visible landmark for all who were local to it. By placing the victims in this place, accompanied by animal offerings and valuable personal items, the people behind the killings could have been creating a highly visible statement of dominance over the present – and the future. The act may have functioned in much the same way as the ritual destruction of weapons or treasure hoards found elsewhere in Bronze Age Europe. Across prehistoric Europe, archaeologists have discovered numerous hoards of deliberately buried weapons, tools and valuables, which are often interpreted as ritual deposits meant to display wealth, reinforce authority or communicate religious or political messages. In those cases, valuable objects were deliberately sacrificed to demonstrate authority and power. It’s an idea that there are echoes of in this mass burial – albeit with valuable humans being sacrificed, rather than valuable goods. That’s one interpretation – and it might seem like the only interpretation that makes sense of all the various strands of evidence when put together. However, this interpretation is far from definitive. Experts argue that, sometimes, the attempt to extract grand conclusions from single sites is inherently problematic. Professor Bickle stresses that such acts are often rooted in specific local circumstances rather than broad, universal patterns: “My sense is that these acts of violence are often bound up in local or regional events, rather than having an underpinning evolutionary development. While projects like this give us insight into how mass violence took place, they do not give us definitive answers as to why these events took place. This will take careful regional analysis of a broader range of archaeological and environmental data.” Professor Howard Williams, an archaeologist at the University of Chester, is an expert on the study of death and burial. Speaking to HistoryExtra, he agrees on the importance of understanding the local context. “I would emphasise the need for further fieldwork in the locality to help understand their relationship with contemporary mortuary practices and settlement patterns to help provide context. Exceptional mass graves hit the headlines, but we often lack the fine-grained understanding of the specific time and locality to extrapolate out to broader patterns of violence.” In other words, without a deep understanding of that local context, the evidence presented by the new research arguably leaves more questions than answers. The victims’ diverse origins suggest they may have been refugees, captives or displaced people moving through the region during a time of upheaval. They might have been intercepted by a rival group while journeying along the Sava River corridor. Pointing to this ambiguity, Professor Williams highlights the range of plausible scenarios that still fit the evidence: “It isn’t clear to me we can rule out the wholesale massacre of one population who had themselves disparate origins, or hostages or captives brought from far-and-wide to represent a wider population.” Read more | 4,500 years ago, Arctic Greenland's Paleo-Inuit made terrifying ocean voyages. Why did they risk it? Continuing to highlight the other potential explanations, he says that even the meaning of the burial itself remains open to interpretation: “regarding the mass grave itself, it might have been created by the survivors to honour loved ones and remembered as a focus of veneration, remembrance and resistance to the perpetrators – or a mass grave created to perpetuate intimidation and hegemony by the perpetrators.” Without written records, the motivations behind the massacre can only be inferred indirectly – it can only be guesswork, based on the site itself, and knowledge of the broader context. What the new research does demonstrate, however, is that large-scale violence in prehistoric Europe might not have been confined to battles between groups over land and resource, or beliefs and ideology. Some episodes of violence may have been deliberately staged acts to communicate power, intimidation and control. The challenge for historians and archaeologists is how to unpick the context of this violence: who it targeted, how it was carried out, and what it was intended to communicate – if anything at all.
4,500 years ago, Arctic Greenland's Paleo-Inuit made terrifying ocean voyages. Why did they risk it?
Archaeological evidence from one of the High Arctic’s most dangerous marine environments reveals that the region’s earliest inhabitants were expert seafarers who undertook perilous open-ocean journeys
Archaeologists have repeatedly underestimated the seafaring abilities of prehistoric peoples. From the maritime traditions of Polynesia to the first crossings into the landmass known as Sahul – the prehistoric continent that once connected Australia, New Guinea, and Tasmania – over 60,000 years ago, claims of early ocean travel have often been met with raised eyebrows. After all, it can be difficult to imagine how these humans crossed vast spans of dangerous water with such limited technology. The prehistoric people who inhabited the Arctic have been no exception to this scepticism. Archaeologists refer to these early Arctic inhabitants as Early Paleo-Inuit: small and mobile hunting communities who lived across northern Greenland and Arctic Canada between roughly 4,500 and 2,800 years ago. For much of the 20th century, archaeologists assumed these communities were a land-based people, edging into frozen landscapes as ice sheets retreated, opening up new inland routes, rather than venturing across open water. This view was shaped in part by the scarcity of evidence for boats and marine hunting technology, because organic materials such as boats, paddles and skins rarely survive in the archaeological record. This lack of preservation is still a problem faced by archaeologists today. As a result, the true extent of prehistoric maritime activity in the Arctic – and across the globe – has long remained uncertain. But a new discovery from northern Greenland is now challenging this long-standing view, providing the strongest evidence yet for something some Arctic specialists have long suspected. How the Early Paleo-Inuit reached northern Greenland In the far north of Greenland, beyond the limits of permanent modern settlement, sits a small archipelago called Kitsissut. More than 700 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle, this cluster of islands sits at a similar latitude to Norway’s Svalbard; one of the coldest and most ice-bound places on Earth. Reaching these islands by water is still a risk today, due to perilous currents and extreme weather conditions. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/A-view-of-the-crossing-between-Kitsissut-and-shores-of-Avanersuaq-NW-Greenland-with-a-minimum-of-distance-of-53km.-The-archaeological-beach-ridges-at-Isbjorne-Island-can-be-seen-in-the-foreground-6971dd7-e1771339327508.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Cold, open water separates the Kitsissut archipelago from the Greenland mainland. Even today, crossing this stretch of Arctic sea is hazardous — yet archaeological evidence suggests Early Paleo-Inuit communities were making journeys of more than 50 kilometres here nearly 4,500 years ago." title="A view of the crossing between Kitsissut and shores of Avanersuaq (NW Greenland), with a minimum of distance of 53km. The archaeological beach ridges at Isbjørne Island can be seen in the foreground" /> However, new archaeological research published in the journal Antiquity shows that almost 4,500 years ago – in the early Bronze Age, when the Old Kingdom of ancient Egypt was still at the height of its power – ancestors of modern Inuit populations were making this journey using nothing more than small boats constructed from animal skins stretched over lightweight timber frames. The discovery challenges long-standing assumptions about how the Arctic was first inhabited. The region’s earliest peoples now appear to have been highly skilled seafarers, capable of repeated long-distance open-water voyages. Read more | Who owns Greenland? Why the island's history is more complicated than you think Reaching Kitsissut from the nearest known Early Paleo-Inuit settlement would have required an extraordinarily risky journey of more than 50 kilometres across open water. According to the researchers, this is the longest sea journey that can be confidently inferred for this period anywhere in the Arctic. “That’s an extraordinary voyage in small skin-on-frame watercraft,” says Matthew Walls, the study’s lead author and an associate professor at the University of Calgary. “It would have required facing erratic weather, strong crosswinds, powerful currents and very high risk of being swept into the expanse of Baffin Bay.” Why did the Early Paleo-Inuit head for Kitsissut? But the question is not just how these people reached Kitsissut, but rather what could have drawn these people so far north, into such treacherous places. The answer can be found in the Kitsissut islands’ location within Pikialasorsuaq, also known as the North Water polynya – a vast stretch of ocean between northern Greenland and Canada that remains ice-free even during the harsh Arctic winter. Polynyas form when ocean currents, winds and temperature differences prevent sea ice from forming despite sub-zero conditions. They are rare zones of open water amid otherwise frozen seas. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/Archaeological-beach-ridges-and-field-camp-at-Isbjorne-Island-Kitsissut.-The-nesting-cliffs-for-AppatThick-Billed-Murre-Uria-lomvia-towers-in-the-background-7c63598-e1771339680320.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="An archaeological field camp sits below the steep nesting cliffs of thick-billed murres on Isbjørne Island. Such seabird colonies, sustained by the nearby North Water polynya, would have provided a dense and predictable food source for Early Paleo-Inuit visitors." title="Archaeological beach ridges and field camp at Isbjørne Island, Kitsissut. The nesting cliffs for Appat_Thick Billed Murre (Uria lomvia) towers in the background" /> Unsurprisingly, polynyas are ecological hotspots. They provide refuge for huge numbers of fish and marine mammals, as well as vast seabird colonies – a rare concentration of food in an otherwise extremely challenging environment. Commenting on the news to HistoryExtra, Professor Robert W Park, a specialist in Arctic archaeology at the University of Waterloo, explains that the seasonal importance of polynyas to Inuit communities would have been critical, especially in the coldest months. “During the cold part of the Arctic year, prey species need access to open water, and the polynya is the only place that stays open,” he says. “Every other part of the ocean is completely frozen.” As a result, resources become highly concentrated around polynyas in winter and spring. “That’s when people would be there,” Park adds, “not during the summer, when resources are widely distributed across the land and ocean, and when there are long stretches of open water.” But the same forces that make polynyas rich in wildlife also make them exceptionally dangerous to cross. Navigating these zones would have meant accepting the risks posed by freezing water temperatures and drifting sea ice capable of crushing small boats. Read more | A thousand years ago, the Vikings had a shock encounter with Native Americans that ended in disaster For all the danger, Park notes that these journeys may not always have involved crossing uninterrupted stretches of open water. Instead, boats may have been used “not to traverse 50 kilometres of open water, but rather to travel and hunt in the patches of open water (called ‘leads’) between broken ice, [with people] hauling their boats up onto the ice when the leads close.” The archaeological evidence of repeated Arctic voyages No matter how far the open water crossings were, the evidence makes it clear that Kitsissut wasn’t reached by chance – for example, by a lone boat knocked off course. Instead, generations of people returned to the islands again and again, over many centuries. These conclusions are based on an extensive archaeological survey conducted on the central islands of the archipelago. Researchers documented nearly 300 archaeological features, including Early Paleo-Inuit tent rings and hearths. Tent rings – circles of stones used to anchor skin tents – are among the most common structural traces left by highly mobile Arctic cultures. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/archaeologist-standing-over-rocky-beach-with-tent-ring-evidence-e1771340346171.jpeg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Stone tent rings — circles once used to anchor skin tents against Arctic winds — remain scattered across raised beach ridges in Kitsissut. Despite their modest appearance, such features reveal generations of repeated seasonal visits." title="archaeologist-standing-over-rocky-beach-with-tent-ring-evidence" /> Many of these features cluster beneath towering seabird cliffs, where thick-billed murres nest by the thousands, creating a rich and predictable food source. Radiocarbon dating of seabird bone recovered from one dwelling places human activity at the site between roughly 4,400 and 3,900 years ago, coinciding with the early formation of the polynya itself. This overlap suggests that human movement into the region occurred as this emerging ecological system became stable enough to support dense wildlife populations – highlighting the depth of Early Paleo-Inuit environmental knowledge. “The fact that these early communities made this journey regularly, transporting families and supplies to access seasonal resources like seabird colonies at the islands, demonstrates a level of maritime skill that reshapes our understanding of this period,” Walls says. As he adds, “reaching Kitsissut required skills that would have been a defining part of social life, passed down and refined as each generation re-learned by going out into the sea to travel and hunt.” Arctic seafaring in a global context This discovery fits within a broader pattern of archaeology’s long struggle to accurately capture early sea travel. Comparable distances once seemed implausible in other prehistoric contexts as well. Archaeological estimates of Polynesian voyaging ranges, for example, were routinely underestimated until experimental archaeology and indigenous knowledge demonstrated the true capabilities of early sea vessels. Read more | What happened to the people of Rapa Nui? Speaking to HistoryExtra, Professor Sue Hamilton, former director of the UCL Institute of Archaeology, says that any comparisons between the Early Paleo-Inuit and Polynesian ocean crossings “are too separated in time, place, and environmental context to compare” – other than in terms of “the vastness of their ocean contexts.” She explains that “the Polynesians travelled vast distances across the Pacific in double hulled canoes, using complex navigational observations relying on the stars, ocean swells, bird flights, and wind patterns.” These journeys involved crossing up to 300 kilometres of open ocean for up to three weeks, often against prevailing winds. However, what does link the significance of the new research to this broader pattern, Hamilton says, is that in each case “watercraft had a central role in subsistence, social and ecological structure and survival.”
Toilets through time: prehistoric toilets
Dr Sue Greaney explains to David Musgrove what we know about loos from the Neolithic through to the Iron Age
In episode six of Toilets Through Time, David Musgrove and Dr Sue Greaney look back at what we can learn about studying people's toilet habits from the Neolithic to the Iron Age. How and where did prehistoric people to go to the toilet, and what can we learn from studying their toilet habits? Dr Sue Greaney explains to David Musgrove what we know about loos from the Neolithic through to the Iron Age.
Think men were always the hunters? Stone Age women took down mammoths too – and that's not all
What were the lives of women like throughout the Palaeolithic and Mesolithic periods? Modern archaeology is only just beginning to provide a clear picture
Across the wide plains of central Europe some 20,000 years ago, small bands of people began their days preparing for work. Men and women alike readied their tools: some for hunting, some for gathering up roots and seeds, and others for crafting hides into winter clothing. But the material evidence on which we base our knowledge of the Stone Age is fragmentary. “If we think about the Stone Age, we think about stone tools. Stone tools are what we can find in archaeological digs: they have survived, but so much of our past is perishable,” says Dr Victoria Bateman, author of Economica: A Global History of Women, Wealth and Power, speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast. That fragility matters. If many activities, especially those often carried out by women, left no lasting trace, the archaeological evidence for life in prehistory is bound to be skewed. Yet, Bateman stresses, a patchy record doesn’t mean we know nothing – and what we do now know paints a picture of a nuanced, varied and active life for women of the Stone Age. Life on the Palaeolithic steppe In Ice Age Europe, bands of hunter-gatherers followed herds across a cold steppe dotted with patches of woodland. Their camps were often temporary: circles of hide tents, or hearths dug into the ground. Excavations at sites such as Dolní Věstonice in the Czech Republic or Mezhirich in Ukraine reveal the ingenuity of these communities. At Mezhirich, dwellings were built from mammoth bones, their interiors scattered with flint tools, ochre pigments and fragments of woven fibres. Read more | 8 little-known prehistoric sites in Britain Life was harsh, and women were certainly not confined to passive roles. They crafted clothing from hides and sinew, stitched with bone needles, and their handiwork was essential to life in freezing conditions. They gathered plants, berries, roots and nuts – knowledge that required expert ecological awareness. And, as recent research shows, many also took part in the hunt. The invisible work of women “In early societies, so much of what was produced – whether it was baskets or fishing nets, or some of the earliest forms of clothing – has disintegrated with time. Women were heavily involved in manufacturing those perishable goods, but because they haven’t survived, I think we have, to an extent, really sidelined women’s contribution to these societies,” says Bateman. Read more | 7 things you (probably) didn’t know about Roman women Occasionally, the past does leave a clue. At Pavlov in the Czech Republic, the imprint of a woven net survives on clay more than 25,000 years old. In waterlogged Mesolithic sites in Denmark, fragments of cord, fishing gear and wooden paddles provide glimpses of the vanished toolkit. Such finds emphasise how communities depended as much on fibres, textiles and nets as they did on stone spearheads. Much of this labour was collaborative. Women likely taught daughters and sons how to spin fibres, twist cords or weave simple bags. The knowledge was generational and communal. Without it, the great hunts would have been impossible, because nets and ropes were as vital to trapping animals as spears. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/GettyImages-805030818-a721cf2-e1760093891186.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="This illustration depicts the daily activities of prehistoric people during the Stone Age, including hunting, tool-making, and life in cave dwellings. Such reconstructions offer a glimpse into how early humans adapted to their environment long before the advent of writing or agriculture." title="Life and activity of prehistoric people" /> The hunter–gatherer dichotomy But who precisely were these hunters? “When it comes to hunters, what does survive from the past are skeletons and the types of hunting equipment that they had with them. The long-standing assumption in archaeology was that if someone was buried with hunting tools then they must have been male,” Bateman explains. This assumption reflected the mid-20th century world in which many archaeologists worked. The model of men as hunters by default neatly mirrored the roles seen across western societies at the time. In effect, modern gender norms were being projected back into deep history, creating a story of universal gender division that was simple to understand. Recent decades of research have changed this thinking. Read more | Women in ancient Greece: what were their lives like? “It’s only in the last couple of decades or so that archaeologists have begun using the latest DNA technology – more recently examining teeth – to find out that some hunters originally presumed male were actually female,” says Bateman. The results have been striking. In the Andes, a 9,000-year-old burial at Wilamaya Patjxa, Peru – long assumed to be male because it contained a big-game hunting kit – was revealed by DNA to be female. Similar reassessments across North and South America suggest that up to 40 per cent of hunters were women, “all of whom had just been assumed to be men because the default assumption was: men were the hunters,” Bateman notes. Together, these discoveries show that even with incomplete evidence, new tools can overturn old certainties. The ‘gatherer’ label obscures a more dynamic picture in which women shifted between roles, with labour shaped as much by immediate needs, environments and group size as by gender. What life was really like for prehistoric women So – what might a day in the life of a prehistoric woman have looked like? Imagine a Mesolithic camp on the shores of a Scandinavian lake some 8,000 years ago. At dawn, women might have checked fish traps woven from willow, while others gathered berries in plaited baskets. By mid-morning, a group might have set out with bows and arrows to stalk red deer, children in tow. Later, hides might have been scraped clean with flint and sinew twisted into threads. Archaeological evidence is what creates this picture. Preserved fish traps from Denmark’s Ertebølle culture show women’s weaving skills at work. Bone needles and tailored garments from Ice Age burials prove that clothing was carefully crafted, not crudely thrown together. Charred remnants in hearths show that plant foods were a crucial part of the diet, often gathered by women. Flint tools worn smooth from scraping hides speak of the endless labour of preparing clothing. The archaeological record will always be partial, but science is bringing back long lost voices. Prehistoric life was diverse and improvised – with roles dictated by much more than gender. Victoria Bateman was speaking to Danny Bird on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.
A Bronze Age Brexit: why did these Britons mysteriously cut themselves off from Europe?
Cutting ties with continental Europe in around 3000 BC, ancient Britons abandoned innovation and shunned trade. Why did they choose this dramatic self-isolation? Archaeologist Mike Parker Pearson suggests one answer to the mystery
Around 3000 BC, while continental Europe embraced technological breakthroughs such as metallurgy and wheeled vehicles, the people of the British Isles – the Neolithic farming communities who would build some of the islands’ most iconic monuments, including Stonehenge – turned their back on the rest of the world. Isolating themselves off from continental Europe, these Britons wanted to be left alone. “For reasons that we're just beginning to glean, Britain cut itself off from the continent,” says archaeologist Mike Parker Pearson, speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast. It was, he argues, “an absolutely ridiculous thing to have done.” Why did they do it? And was it a Bronze Age Brexit? The end of the Neolithic period This was the tail end of the Neolithic period, an era characterised by settled farming, communal living, and the construction of some of the world’s most famous – and mysterious – architectural achievements. On the continent, new ideas and materials were moving quickly through a complex network of trade and migration. The earliest signs of the Bronze Age – defined by the use of metal tools and weapons made by combining copper and tin – were already emerging. Read more | 8 little-known prehistoric sites in Britain But in Britain, the Neolithic peoples – descendants of early farming migrants who had arrived around 4000 BC – stopped engaging with that continental momentum. “They were not plugged into the exchange networks of the whole of Europe,” Parker Pearson explains. “Given that metallurgy was available, given that knowledge of the wheel was also there on the continent, they were just blocking off all these potential innovations.” An early split from Europe The archaeological record bears this out. Pottery styles, burial practices and architectural forms all diverge sharply from those seen across the channel. “We can also see that there’s absolutely no traded material going either way across the channel,” he adds. “The traditions that developed in Britain were completely different, both in architectural [terms] and [in] small items like pottery.” However, Parker Pearson doesn’t characterise this divergence as a rejection of progress. It was during this era that these communities produced some of the most iconic monuments in British and Irish history. “It’s within that period of isolation that they built Stonehenge and other major stone circles,” Parker Pearson says, “as well as the big henge enclosures – circular, ditched and banked structures.” These are styles that are, he says, “entirely restricted to the islands of Britain and Ireland.” These monuments are a hallmark of what’s known as Late Neolithic Britain and Ireland, a period marked by spiritual and ritual innovation rather than technological progress. Stonehenge and Avebury in Wiltshire, and Newgrange in County Meath, Ireland are key examples, but there are more than 70 other ceremonial centres that became key locations for gatherings, ceremonies, and seasonal feasting. Read more | Visiting Avebury and Silbury Hill, the site of Neolithic Britons But these were not urban or densely populated societies. “It’s a community that is also without villages,” Parker Pearson says. “We have just single farmsteads scattered across southern Britain, and there are key places – centres for ceremonial and monumental activity.” Rather than staying in one place, these communities could travel. “People were not quite nomadic, but highly mobile,” he adds. “They were living in different places at different times of the year, moving with their animals – their cattle and their pigs – to be at the ceremonial centres for particular times of year, for feasting.” Then, around 2500 BC, everything changed. The Beaker takeover The Beaker people, so named by historians and archaeologists after their distinctive bell-shaped pottery vessels, began to arrive from continental Europe around 2500 BC, bringing this era of isolation to an end. They brought with them not only new technologies like metalworking and individual burial customs, but also different genetic lineages. Within a few centuries, they had largely replaced the native Neolithic population, in both cultural and biological terms. “Within some 16 generations of the initial Beaker arrival, we’re seeing the very large replacement of the gene pool. The population – 400 years later, 16 generations later – they've really got only about 10% of that British farmers DNA in their genome.” So, the Beakers’ arrival set Britain on a new course, bringing technologies that would tie Britain closer to the progress elsewhere in the world. But why had Britain withdrawn in the first place? “We don’t have any idea,” Parker Pearson concedes. However, recent breakthroughs in ancient DNA analysis point to one potential cause: disease. Read more | How was Stonehenge built? “One of the really interesting results we’re getting from DNA analysis is that we can see episodes of Bubonic Plague,” he says. The bacteria that cause plague, Yersinia pestis, can survive in ancient human remains, and has now been found in the teeth of people buried in Neolithic Britain. “We know that there were at least two cases of Bubonic Plague in Britain,” he says. “One [occurred] before the Beaker people even arrived – around 2900–2800 BC, so about four centuries earlier. And then we’ve got a second event some 300 years after their initial arrival,” which can be seen in evidence “from burials in different parts of Britain”. In both cases, the presence of plague raises questions about population movement. Read more | Your guide to the Black Death “It is possible that we are just seeing the tip of the iceberg there,” Parker Pearson explains, “and that the whole point about these large-scale migrations is that they act as a vector for the spreading of diseases across the whole continent.” It’s possible, then, that Britain’s decision to isolate itself wasn’t purely social or economic. Fear of disease – and attempts to halt its spread – may have played a key role in severing links with the continent, centuries earlier. This dramatic period of separation ended with the arrival of the Beaker people, who reconnected Britain with Europe and ushered in the Bronze Age proper. But for three centuries before that, Britain stood alone and independent – isolated and insular, but also culturally unique, innovative in other ways that echo to the present day. Mike Parker Pearson was speaking to Spencer Mizen on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.
The Beaker People: everything you wanted to know
Everything you wanted to know about history (podcast series)
Mike Parker-Pearson answers listener questions on the prehistoric people famed for their brilliant metal ornaments – and credited with transforming Britain 4,500 years ago
Who were the Beaker People? What was their contribution to the building of Stonehenge? And did their arrival in Britain really lead to the obliteration of the indigenous population? Here, in conversation with Spencer Mizen, Mike Parker-Pearson answers the most pressing questions on the prehistoric culture that changed Britain for good.
The Assyrians: everything you wanted to know
Paul Collins answers listener questions on the ancient people who forged what was arguably the world's first true empire
Why were Assyrian armies so powerful? Did the Assyrians produce the ancient world's greatest cultural treasure? And what should we make of claims that they forged the world's first empire? In conversation with Spencer Mizen, Paul Collins, curator at the British Museum, answers listener questions on this ancient civilisation. Paul Collins is the author of The Assyrians: Lost Civilizations (Reaktion, 2024). Buy it now from Amazon
Ancient Mesopotamia: everything you wanted to know
Moudhy Al-Rashid answers listener questions on ancient Mesopotamia, which encompassed multiple remarkable civilisations and saw numerous revolutionary innovations
Do you know your Sumerians from your Babylonians and your Akkadians? All these civilisations formed part of the story of ancient Mesopotamia, where city states were formed, writing flourished, the wheel was possibly invented, mathematics was practiced, and dogs were gods, pets and warriors. Speaking to David Musgrove for today's 'everything you wanted to know' episode, Dr Moudhy Al-Rashid answers listener questions on the ancient region. Moudhy Al-Rashid is the author of Between Two Rivers: Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History (Hodder & Stoughton, 2025). Buy it now from Waterstones