Long Lasting
Probability in the Pleistocene: Origins and Antiquity of Native American Dice, Games of Chance, and Gambling
Robert Madden
American Antiquity, forthcoming
Abstract:
This article investigates the prehistory of Native American dice, games of chance, and gambling and for the first time traces these artifacts and cultural practices to their earliest appearances. Uncertainty about whether prehistoric North American artifacts can be confidently identified as dice without objective criteria has meant that no prior attempt to accomplish this task has been undertaken. This uncertainty is addressed here by (1) deriving a morphological test for identifying prehistoric dice based on diagnostic attributes shared among 293 sets of historic Native American dice documented in Stewart Culin's 1907 compendium Games of the North American Indians and (2) using this test to search the published North American archaeological record for matching artifacts. The results suggest that dice, games of chance, and gambling have been a persistent feature of Native American culture for the last 12,000 years, with the earliest dice appearing in Late Pleistocene Folsom deposits in Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico. Remarkably, these Pleistocene dice predate their earliest known Old World counterparts by millennia. These results suggest that ancient Native Americans possessed a basic working knowledge of chance, randomness, and probability and consequently were early movers in humanity's emerging understanding and practical application of these concepts.
Population discontinuity in the Paris Basin linked to evidence of the Neolithic decline
Frederik Seersholm et al.
Nature Ecology & Evolution, April 2026, Pages 677-688
Abstract:
At the transition between the third and the fourth millennium BC, there is evidence for a population decline concurrent with the end of megalith building across continental northwestern Europe. In Scandinavia this 'Neolithic decline' is followed by a massive population turnover, as farming communities disappeared and were replaced by people with steppe ancestry. In western Europe, however, ancestry associated with Neolithic farmers persisted beyond the Neolithic decline, and it remains unclear whether a similar demographic replacement occurred. To investigate the population dynamics around the Neolithic decline in present-day France, we sequenced 132 ancient genomes from the allée sépulcrale at Bury. Located in the Paris area, Bury spans two burial phases separated by a hiatus with no burial activity: one phase directly preceding the Neolithic decline in the late fourth millennium BC, ending around 3000 BC, and a later phase some time after the Neolithic decline in the early- to mid-third millennium BC. Our analysis revealed that the two burial phases at Bury represented largely discontinuous genetic groups of a markedly different social organization as inferred from three large pedigrees. We show that the difference between the two burial phases can be linked to a northwards movement of Neolithic ancestry from the south, which only spread into the Paris Basin after the Neolithic decline, at around 2900 BC. Together with genetic evidence of various infectious diseases in the dataset, such as Yersinia pestis and Borrelia recurrentis, as well as evidence for forest regrowth between the two phases, these findings detail a population turnover at the end of the fourth millennium BC, offering a possible explanation for the cessation of megalith building.
Ancient DNA reveals pervasive directional selection across West Eurasia
Ali Akbari et al.
Nature, forthcoming
Abstract:
Ancient DNA has transformed our understanding of population history, but its potential to reveal as much about human evolutionary biology has not been realized because of limited sample sizes and the difficulty of distinguishing sustained rises in allele frequency increasing fitness -- directional selection -- from shifts due to migrations, population structure, or non-adaptive purifying or stabilizing selection. Here we present a method for detecting directional selection in ancient DNA time-series data that tests for consistent trends in allele frequency change over time, and apply it to 15,836 West Eurasians (10,016 with new data). Previous work has shown that classic hard sweeps driving advantageous mutations to fixation have been rare over the broad span of human evolution. By contrast, in the past ten millennia, we find that many hundreds of alleles have been affected by strong directional selection. We also document one-standard-deviation changes on the scale of modern variation in combinations of alleles that today predict complex traits. This includes decreases in predicted body fat and schizophrenia, and increases in measures of cognitive performance. These effects were measured in industrialized societies, and it remains unclear how these relate to phenotypes that were adaptive in the past. We estimate selection coefficients at 9.7 million variants, enabling study of how Darwinian forces couple to allelic effects and shape the genetic architecture of complex traits.
Late Antique-Early Byzantine urban transformation in Mid-Northern Anatolia: A multiproxy approach from Pompeiopolis
Melis Uzdurum, Mustafa Nuri Tatbul & Susan Marie Mentzer
PLoS One, April 2026
Abstract:
During the 6th century CE, many Late Antique cities in the eastern Mediterranean -- especially in Anatolia -- underwent major changes. By the 7th century CE, most had gradually lost their urban functions. As populations declined, urban spaces were reused for domestic, industrial and rural purposes. This shift is visible in the archaeological record, through the abandonment and reuse of public spaces. At Zımbıllı Tepe-Pompeiopolis, located in in Paphlagonia (northern Anatolia), which was occupied during Late Antiquity and Medieval periods, architectural remains, artifacts, and radiocarbon (C14) dates from both public and private areas show patterns consistent with this broader urban transformation across Anatolia between the 6th and late 7th centuries. To better understand how the site transformed over time, we conducted micro-scale, multiproxy analysis. These included macrobotanical and microdebris studies, micromorphology, x-ray fluorescence (XRF), microscopic fourier transform infrared (micro-FTIR), and C14 dating, based on samples from a street sewer and a connected private latrine. Together, these datasets reveal the cultural and natural processes that shaped the site's last occupation, its abandonment, and its post-abandonment transformation. The disuse and infilling of the sewer suggest a halt in public maintenance toward the end of the occupation, while the latrine's earlier abandonment reflects gradual organizational changes already in the 6th century. This study provides a macro-and-micro-scale view of urban transformation during the 6th-7th centuries using a multiproxy approach, which remains rare in archaeological studies of this period in Anatolia.
Unveiling bast fiber production in Upper Paleolithic North China: Microfibers and usewear traces on stone tools from Shizitan
Li Liu et al.
PLoS One, April 2026
Abstract:
Fiber technology -- including the making of cordages, mats, baskets, and textiles -- holds a crucial place in human history. However, uncovering archaeological evidence of early fiber products proves challenging due to their rapid decay. To address preservation hurdles, we employ a multi-disciplinary approach to interpret microfiber remains, drawing on microfossil remains, usewear traces, ethnographic observation, and experimental archaeology, to study artifacts from two Upper Paleolithic Shizitan (SZT) site localities on the North China Loess Plateau, dating 28,000-18,000 cal BP, encompassing the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), on which we identify microremains of hemp and flax. Analyses of microfossil remains (microfibers, phytoliths, and fungi) and usewear traces on stone tools potentially reveal stages of bast fiber production, such as cutting stalks, retting, pounding fiber ribbons, and scraping to remove impurities. Such pounding and scraping are commonly associated with textile production in ethnographic accounts, and parallel evidence has also been observed on Neolithic stone tools in North China. Observations of colored fibers suggest SZT people may have extracted plant-based dyes and hematite pigment to color fibers. The cold-dry conditions of the LGM, which likely led to the depopulation of regions north of SZT, also may have driven increased fiber production, aligning with previously recognized shifts toward microblade production, broader interregional interactions, ritual activities, and broad-spectrum subsistence, including early wild millet use. This research provides new evidence for the deep history of fiber production in Upper Paleolithic China and demonstrates the value of usewear and microfossil analyses for studying ancient fiber technology.