Archaeology’s top discoveries of 2024 include preserved brains and a lost city

Preserved brains, arthritis in ancient Egypt and other finds made headlines

A large stone that lies in the center of Stonehenge, called the Altar Stone (shown center with two rocks lying on top of it), was sourced from northeastern Scotland. The finding surprised scientists because other stones around the Altar Stone have Welsh roots.

Adam Stanford

By Maria Temming

December 17, 2024 at 1:00 pm

Grisly details about ancient child sacrifices, 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.

Bygone brains

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 out, frozen or otherwise preserved (SN: 3/19/24). Brains may owe such surprising sturdiness to their chemical makeup.

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

Ancient arts and crafts

The oldest rock art in the Americas may be a set of cave paintings in Argentina that date back some 8,200 years (SN: 3/9/24, p. 16). That’s 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 humans 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 with some kind of red drawing material. Some art in this cave dates back to as early as 8,200 years ago. — Hunter-gatherers in northwestern Patagonia, Argentina painted nearly 900 designs (some shown) in a cave over 130 generations, probably to transmit cultural knowledge, researchers say.Guadalupe Romero Villanueva

Herder heritage

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

A skull with an arrow shot through the nose is displayed on a black background. The Danish bog skull, known as Porsmose Man, dates to around 4,600 years ago. — This Danish bog skull found with an arrow that had been shot through the nose dates to about 4,600 years ago, around the time when incoming herding groups from Asia transformed the genetic profiles of Danes and other people throughout Europe.The Danish National Museum

Egyptian ergonomics

Hunching over scrolls took a toll on ancient Egyptian scribes (SN: 6/27/24). The skeletons of 30 scribes buried at the Abusir pyramid complex show signs of arthritis and other damage from poor posture.

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

Stonehenge’s Scottish centerpiece

The mysterious Altar Stone at the heart of Stonehenge likely came from Scotland (SN: 8/14/24). Previously thought to share the Welsh origens of other Stonehenge blocks, the stone closely matches the mineral makeup of the Orcadian Basin, a Scottish rock formation.

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

Pompeii’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day

Pompeii’s infamous apocalypse was worse than thought. When Mount Vesuvius erupted in A.D. 79, it didn’t just coat nearby cities with lethally 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. — This skeleton’s fractures suggest that the person was crushed by the house he sheltered in when Mount Vesuvius erupted in A.D. 79. The explosion likely caused quakes that toppled the house.Pompeii Archaeological Park

Maya sacrifices unmasked

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

image of ancient Maya site of Chichén Itzá — Twin brothers and other related young boys were ritually sacrificed in Chichén Itzá (a temple at the ancient Maya site, shown).Johannes Krause

A lost city no more

Laser scans unveiled 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 remnants of roads and farms. Inhabited from roughly 500 B.C. to A.D. 1500, the city shows how sophisticated Amazonian civilizations were long before European conquest.

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

X marks the spot

In a rare case of productive social media scrolling, a researcher identified part of a lost civilization’s alphabet in a photo of an engraved slate posted to X (SN: 6/24/24). Found in Spain, the slate is from the Tartessos civilization, which vanished in the fifth century B.C. The writing system is linked to the Phoenician alphabet that shaped Latin, Spanish and English writing.

A close up of the slab with letters highlighted — An analysis of an ancient slate slab revealed engraved letters (outlined in green), hinting that artisans from Spain’s Tartessos culture inscribed an alphabet on the slate. Researchers plan to examine other slate fragments in hopes of finding 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 that 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 humans to grow their own food.

The view to the landscape from inside a cave in Morocco that archaeologists have been excavating. You can see trenches in the foreground and a few trees and a hillside with some vegetation beyond. — An analysis of human remains unearthed from this Moroccan cave suggest that some late Stone Age hunter-gatherers had a largely plant-based diet. But they never domesticated the plants, researchers say.Abdeljalil Bouzouggar

Population boom idea is a bust

Contrary to popular belief, early Polynesian settlers of Rapa Nui, aka Easter Island, might not have undergone a population boom that destroyed their civilization and the island’s environment. Ground surveys and satellite data hint that Polynesian islanders who arrived some 800 years ago set up a modest farming system and maintained a steady population of less than 4,000 until Europeans arrived 300 years ago (SN: 8/10/24, p. 14).