20 Greatest Historical Discoveries of 2025-2026

Back in January, I put out a video on the greatest archaeological discoveries of the year. And yes, every year archaeologists uncover amazing new finds. But that is usually where the historical work begins. After something has been found, other people go to work on it. Historians, linguists, and scientists, archaeologists themselves, take a closer look to see what else these objects might be able to reveal about our ancient past. Well, this past year, exciting new information has come to light. In this video, we're going to look at my personal ranking of the 20 greatest historical discoveries reported within the last 12 months. So let's get started with number 20, the orator stage. When we think about Roman politics, we often picture civil wars, assassinations, speeches, mobs, and famous men competing for power. But the speeches and the mobs happened in a real place, the Roman Forum. An orator had to stand somewhere, the crowd had to gather somewhere, and Roman speakers didn't communicate only with their voices. They were trained to use facial expressions and hand gestures too. A recent study details an examination of the speaking platforms of the Forum and some interesting discoveries that were made as a result. Researchers from Jagiellonian University and the Vienna University of Technology used 3D reconstructions of the Forum at three moments in time, about 54 BCE in the late Republic, about 27 BCE in the early Augustan period, and about 14 CE at the end of Augustus' reign. They modeled visibility from the Old Republican Rostra, the Augustan Rostra, the platform of the Temple of Castor, and the platform of the Temple of Divus Iulius. For how well the crowd could see detailed finger gestures of a speaker, they used a practical visibility threshold of about 83 meters, or 270 feet. The construction of the Temple of Divus Iulius and later Augustan monuments changed how crowds could gather and see. Roman public speech was originally a contest for attention. In the late Republic, a speaker needed to gather a crowd, hold it, answer rivals, and make himself visible as a political actor. A forum with rival speaking platforms and large shared open spaces suited that kind of politics, because a crowd could form around a speaker, drift toward another speaker, and become part of a larger public reaction. The Augustan Forum served a different political world. Public speech continued, but it took place in a space increasingly organized around the emperor's authority. The new platforms and monuments didn't have to silence crowds. They separated audiences more clearly, standardized where people gathered, and surrounded political speech with buildings tied to the new regime. The old competition for the same crowd gave way to managed performances. This study shows very well how the physical setting for political speeches had a lot to do with actual politics themselves, and it gives us a greater understanding of what monumental design in later periods was actually trying to accomplish. When people talk about cleanliness in the ancient world, it's common to believe that the ancients didn't care much for washing, or if they did, that was only in the context of religious rituals. A new study of the Hittites, who ruled Anatolia in the second millennium BCE, tackles the question of hygiene in Hittite society. It brings together Hittite vocabulary, written instructions, and archaeological evidence from places like houses and temples, washing spaces, drainage areas, and bathtubs. At Hatusha, examples of ceramic bathtubs and washrooms have been found in houses in the Lower City and the Upper City and the rocky ridge called the Buyukale. The texts add detail. One mythic passage describes the goddess Ishtar going into a washroom, washing herself and anointing herself with perfumed oil. Other texts refer to substances such as soapwort, used to make water more effective for cleaning. The study reconstructs a social code. We find that Hittite cleanliness was not confined to temple rituals. It also shows up in the ordinary mechanics of life. Washing bodies and cleaning vessels, preparing food, laundry, and managing drinking water. But also in rules for approaching a superior, or sitting down for a meal. A servant approaching the king, a priest handling sacred things, or someone working around food and water would be held to very specific standards. We shouldn't imagine every person in the Hittite world living by one identical rulebook. But we can now see something much more nuanced than ancient people washed or ancient people didn't wash. Maybe you suspected all this anyway. But I like learning about daily life kind of stuff and found it fascinating. Number 18. Number notation might go further back. At the archaeological site of La Blanca in Guatemala, researchers were looking at a small broken ceramic figurine from the Middle Preclassic period, dated to about 750 to 650 BCE. The figurine came from a household on the lower end of the economic scale. The object itself is a small ceramic body from a household setting. The upper part is shaped like a projecting tab, and a comparison with related La Blanca figurines shows that the tab probably represents a head. On this figurine, that upper tab has a horizontal band across it, like a headband. Above the band are 11 dots arranged in three columns. If the 11 dots are numerical, they're placed in a meaningful part of the figure, the head area. Why think those dots might be numbers rather than decoration? First, they're arranged as a countable group. Second, the band beneath them frames the dots compositionally. And third, dots were a normal way to write numbers in Mesoamerica later on. Numbers were used for calendars, divination, astronomy, and accounting. The body connection is relevant because Mesoamerican counting was vigesimal, based on the human body, ten fingers and ten toes. If they are right, then this broken figurine may preserve an early numerical mark on a human-shaped object centuries before the better-known writing systems of later Mesoamerica. Number 17, advanced surgery in the Altai Mountains. This one begins high in the Altai Mountains of southern Siberia, on the Ukok Plateau, with the skull of a Pazarek woman who lived about 2,500 years ago. The skull came from a burial site. The woman had suffered a terrible injury. Her right temporal bone was depressed by about 6 to 8 millimeters, roughly a quarter of an inch, and the joint that connects the lower jaw to the skull had been badly damaged. Her mandible was displaced, the joint was partly out of position, and a ligament had torn. Scientists at Nowosobirsk State University scanned the skull. On the damaged side, the teeth were relatively well-preserved. On the left side, the molars were worn down, chipped and inflamed, as if she had spent a very long time chewing almost entirely on that side. The CT images showed why she would do that. In the damaged joint area were two smooth drilled canals. They met at a right angle when the jaw was closed. Most importantly, bone had grown around the holes. That means the drilling happened while she was alive, and she survived afterward. The canals also preserved traces of an elastic material, probably animal tendon or horsehair, which may have helped hold the joint together. The skull preserves evidence of intervention. Someone treated a damaged jaw, drilled into bone with astonishing precision, and used some kind of elastic material, probably tendon, to help stabilize the joint. The operation seems to have given this woman back enough jaw function to keep eating, speaking and living after an injury that could easily have killed her. For a small Iron Age community living in the harsh high valleys of the Altai, this is a surprisingly advanced level of medical care. Number 16. Hidden lineage in Argentina. Ancient DNA has transformed our understanding of the early history of Europe and parts of Asia. South America still has some blank spaces. But in central Argentina, researchers recently analyzed genome-wide data from 238 ancient individuals spanning about 10,000 years across the central southern cone, and they found a lineage that they didn't know existed before. A major one. The earliest known person from this central Argentina lineage lived about 8,500 years ago. Between then and about 4,600 years ago, a large number of people in the region primarily descended from that individual. But people moved and mixed after that. By the mid-Holocene, roughly the middle part of the period covered by the study, this lineage was already coexisting with other lineages. The ancestry also spread outward. It reached the Pampas, the great grassland region of Argentina, by about 3,300 years ago, and later became the main ancestry component there. It also interacted with ancestry from the central Andes in northwest Argentina and with tropical and subtropical forest ancestry in the Gran Chaco. Remarkably, the study also found that this ancient central Argentina ancestry is still an important Native American ancestry component in people from the region today. The surprising part is that this group had been invisible in the ancient DNA record up to this point. Central Argentina had its own deep population history between the Andes, the Amazonian world, and Patagonia, and ancient DNA has now added a missing lineage to the map of South America. Number 15, Zapotec calendar breakthrough. I always love when there's a breakthrough in the decipherment of ancient texts, even if only a small step forward. Monte Alban, in Oaxaca, gives us the earliest known corpus of hieroglyphic writing in Mesoamerica. Some of those inscriptions are more than 2,000 years old. One sign in those texts is called glyph W. It appears with calendar dates, but until now, nobody knew what it meant. Researchers from SUNY Albany and SUNY Plattsburgh approached the problem through the dates themselves. Several inscriptions preserve Zapotec calendar round dates together with glyph W and a number. These are named days in the Zapotec calendar. Once the researchers worked out where those named days fell in relation to one another, they could count how many days separated one carved date from another and thus determine the calendrical meaning of glyph W. The team tested 7,401 possible cycle lengths. Then they compared how well each possible cycle fit the intervals preserved on different monuments. The best fit was about 29.525 days, almost exactly the average lunar month of 29.5306 days. So glyph W seems to record how many evenings the moon had been visible since the new moon. If glyph W appears with the number 1, that would mean the first evening when the crescent moon appears. Because the lunar records are attached to calendar dates, the researchers could check the sequence against real lunar visibility at Monte Alban. Seven placements worked between 650 and 50 BCE, and one also agreed with the Zapotec calendar recorded even as late as the 17th century. A small calendrical sign whose meaning is now known can help date early Zapotec inscriptions and show how precisely people at Monte Alban tracked the moon. On Sardinia, you can hardly talk about the Nuragic culture without talking about the Nuraghi, the huge stone towers that still stand all over the island. There are more than 7,000 of them. But some of the most memorable Nuragic objects are much smaller. Bronze figurines that you can fit in your hand. I recently explored Sardinia and got to see some of these bronzes myself. So this story especially caught my attention. The figurines are called bronzetti, and they were placed mostly in sanctuaries, especially water sanctuaries. For a long time, people were asking, where did their metal come from? That's not just a technical issue. If you can trace the metal, you can ask what kind of society was making these objects. Was Nuragic Sardinia mostly working with its own island resources? Was it depending on imported metal? A team working with institutions in Germany, Denmark, and Italy sampled 48 bronzetti and three copper bun ingots, mostly from prominent Sardinian sanctuaries. The objects date to the late Nuragic period in the early 1st millennium BCE. The difficulty is that metal sourcing can be messy. Lead isotope signatures from Sardinia can overlap with signatures from places such as Iberia. Lead added during metalworking can also blur the source of the original copper. So the team used several chemical tests together. Trace elements, lead isotopes, copper isotopes, tin isotopes, and osmium isotopes. Each test narrowed the source problem in a different way. The answer was wonderfully specific. Much of the copper points to southwest Sardinia. But some copper points across the sea to Iberia. The osmium evidence also helped rule out copper from the Levant, from places like Timna or Finan. And even though Sardinia has tin deposits, the bronzetti do not show detectable local tin. The tin had to come from somewhere else. In some cases, the metal also seems to have gone through repeated mixing and casting rather than one simple production event. So a warrior, a boat, or an animal placed in a Sardinian sanctuary could contain copper from the island, copper from Iberia, and imported tin. Please note that these bronzetti were sacred objects. They were also status symbols. If a horned warrior in a sanctuary was made from Sardinian copper, Spanish copper, and imported tin, then elites on the island were showing off products of long-distance exchange. That makes Sardinia look much more powerful and connected than the old picture of a remote island on the edge of the Mediterranean. In Southeast Asia, silver coins from the first millennium CE have turned up across an enormous area. Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, and as far west as eastern Bangladesh. The coins look broadly similar. They're usually silver, often dye-struck, with a rising sun on one side and the Srivatsa, an early Indic symbol, on the other. They were first minted by polities in north-central Myanmar as early as the 4th century. But they traveled much farther than that. A team based in Singapore and Thailand studied 245 full-unit coins of known provenance from museum collections in Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, and Myanmar. They were looking at marks on the dye. If two coins were struck from the same dye, they can share tiny details. The same lines, the same flaws, the same little quirks in the design. That can show that coins now found in different places were made from the same production tools, or at least from closely connected production practices. The team identified 10 obverse and 7 reverse dye matches. Altogether, dye matches accounted for 86 of the 245 coins. The most dramatic case was the Konlalan Horde at Angkor Bore, where 67 coins came from a single dye pair. Rising sun Srivatsa coins appear in the Varavati-related river settlements in Thailand, possible way stations along the Malay Peninsula, and Funanese sites in the Mekong Delta. One especially dramatic connection runs between coins from Bangladesh and Vietnam more than 2,000 kilometers, or about 1,240 miles apart. That may have been struck from the same dye. With these coins, early Southeast Asia comes into view as a connected economic world. Rulers authorizing coins, artisans striking them, merchants carrying them, and communities using the same symbol of value across a wide region. Number 12. Typhoons in Oracle Bones. Near the end of the Shang Dynasty, roughly 1250 to 1046 BCE in China, diviners carved questions into turtle shells and animal bones. These are the Oracle Bones, one of the oldest bodies of writing in China, and many of the questions were about weather. Would it rain? Should they pray for rain? Was heavy rain coming? These were not abstract questions. In an agricultural society, too little rain could ruin crops, and too much rain could bring floods and hunger and disease and political crisis. Around 3,000 years ago, parts of China went through severe disruption. In the Central Plains, where the Shang world was centered, archaeological population indicators fell, and flood deposits from around the same period show that major flooding had occurred. Farther southwest in the Chengdu Plain, communities connected with the Sanxingdui and Xieqiao cultures also went through major changes. The question is, what kind of flood disaster could have reached so far inland? Well, the researchers started with about 55,000 Oracle Bone pieces from five late Shang phases. They counted inscriptions about rain and heavy rain, praying for rain, related disasters, and using those counts to reconstruct changes in rainfall and heavy rainfall risk across time. They are dated. Then they checked whether those changes lined up with evidence outside the texts. Archaeological data gave them population trends in the Central Plains. Site counts, site locations, and flood deposits showed environmental risk and settlement change in the Chengdu Plain. Paleoclimate records pointed to periods when northward and westward-moving typhoons were stronger. Periods of intensified westward typhoon activity closely coincided with social and settlement change in the Chengdu Plain. Those same intervals also lined up with rainfall and heavy rainfall patterns inferred from the Oracle Bones, and the flood deposits and movement toward higher ground. A typhoon does not have to hit a place directly to damage it. A strong typhoon can carry enormous amounts of moisture inland. If that moisture is pushed upward by mountains or drawn into another weather system, it can fall as extreme rain far from the coast. To test that, the team modeled northward and westward typhoon tracks. They compared weaker and stronger typhoons, then looked for places where the atmosphere piled up moisture in a way that produces heavy rain. They also checked modern weather data to see whether that same moisture signal really does correspond to daily rainfall in the Central Plains and Chengdu Plain. That is the discovery. The Oracle Bones preserve a changing record of rainfall concern, the archaeology shows population and settlement disruption, the flood deposits show actual flooding, and the modeling explains how typhoons from the coast could have helped create extreme rainfall deep inside China. Basque is one of the most fascinating languages in Europe because it doesn't belong to the Indo-European family. So, one of the great questions has always been, where did it come from? One possible answer has been the ancient Iberian language of eastern and southern Spain. Iberian inscriptions can often be read aloud because the script is understood, but the language itself is still mostly not understood. But in recent decades, one part of the case became much harder to ignore. The numbers. Iberian words, such as ban, bi, laur, borsta, abar, orke, have been compared with Basque. These are not just loose sound-alikes. The Iberian versions appear in number-like contexts, including weights and measures, and they combine in ways that make sense for counting. The new study goes beyond numbers and looks at basic words connected with kinship and personal identity, the sort of vocabulary where a real relationship between two languages ought to leave traces. Because we don't know the Iberian language, the study must examine where the forms appear in inscriptions, what suffixes attach to them to see whether they behave like personal names, whether they appear on objects that look like ownership marks, and whether certain elements keep combining with one another. The study finds many correlations, similarities, between Iberian usage and Basque usage. The pattern is hard to ignore. The old question of Basque and Iberian has moved beyond the realm of speculation and has become a pattern that has to be explained. The Keral civilization on the coast of Peru is often described as the oldest civilization in the Americas, but after its great centers declined, people in this region kept adapting, moving, and rebuilding. And one of the places where we can follow the story is Vichama, an agrofishing settlement on Peru's north-central coast, occupied roughly between 1800 and 1500 BCE. It's set in a desert landscape, but close to wetlands fed by groundwater. Vichama is already famous for its wall reliefs. Some show skeletal adult figures with their ribs exposed. Others show youthful figures with hollow-looking bellies. This art has been interpreted as depicting extreme hunger. But how do we know whether this was only symbolic art or whether it reflects a real environmental crisis? The answer came from the floors. The builders at Vichama made floor mortars with clay-rich sediment, and a new study argues that this clay probably came from nearby wetlands. Wetland mud can trap tiny pollen grains from the plants growing around it. Researchers sampled mortar from three buildings across six architectural periods. In the wetter phases, the pollen was dominated by sedges and cattails, the kinds of plants you expect in coastal wetlands. In phases 1, 2, and 6, those wetland plants made up 41.4 to 90.5% of the pollen. In the driest phases, 4 and 5, dated around 1650 to 1550 BCE, grass pollen reached more than 80% in some samples, while wetland plants became scarce. The crop evidence points the same way. Guava seeds from the dry period were smaller and crop richness declined. The researchers connect this with reduced rainfall in the Andes, lower river flow, less groundwater feeding the wetlands, and a local landscape becoming drier and saltier. The images of hunger and renewal now sit beside physical evidence that the local wetlands were shrinking, crops were under pressure, and people were living through a difficult stretch of drought. But Vichama and other sites in the Coral World have also shown evidence of adaptation rather than collapse. People moved, built new settlements, kept farming and fishing, and maintained exchange networks through this period of climate stress. So here we have a few grains of pollen sealed in floor mortar, helping to show how people in one of the earliest civilizations in the Americas faced a climate crisis and suffered terribly, but managed to pull through. In ancient Korea, some powerful people were buried alongside human sacrifices. This happened during the Three Kingdoms period, and one of those kingdoms, Silla, practiced a burial custom called Seonjang, in which sacrificed people were placed in the tomb with the main dead. At the Imdanjoyong Burial Complex in southeastern Korea, Seonjang appears in a large Silla cemetery from the 4th to 6th centuries CE. The site has many tombs, all built within about a century, with grave owners and sacrificed individuals buried together. The big question here was, who were these people to each other? Well, a team analyzed genome-wide DNA from 78 individuals across 44 graves. The results revealed 11 first-degree relative pairs, 23 second-degree pairs, and 20 more distant relative pairs. From that, the researchers reconstructed an extensive kinship network, including 13 families. Some results confirmed what archaeologists had suspected. Two grave owners in parallel tombs turned out to have a marital relationship. In other cases, an offspring was buried close to a parent, which can help work out the order in which graves were built. Five individuals showed signs of being born to closely related parents. One person's parents were first cousins, or even closer. But the most striking result is that this was not limited to elite grave owners. Both the grave owners and the sacrificed people included individuals whose parents were closely related. And genetically, the two groups did not look like separate populations. In some cases, the sacrificed people were kin with the people they were buried with. This opens up many more questions, such as, why would they do this? Hopefully, with more research, we'll be able to figure that out. Number eight, iron at Sanxingdui. Sanxingdui in southwest China is already one of the strangest and most spectacular Bronze Age sites in the world. It flourished in the 2nd millennium BCE with bronze masks, towering figures, gold, jade, elephant tusks, ritual pits, and an artistic world that looks unlike almost anything else from ancient China. But among the objects from Pit 7 is a small artifact about 20 centimeters or 8 inches long. The analysis found that the object is more than 90% iron, with about 7.41% nickel. This is at a Bronze Age site, famous for bronze, gold, jade, and ivory. So what is iron doing in an object from Bronze Age Sanxingdui? That little bit of nickel is the key to understanding this. Ordinary smelted iron doesn't usually look like that. Meteorites, however, often contain iron with significant nickel. The public report also describes homogeneity and microstructural evidence consistent with meteoritic iron. The iron is extraterrestrial. The comparison that immediately comes to mind is Tutankhamun's iron dagger in Egypt, also made from meteoritic iron. These objects belonged to a world before iron was an everyday technology, when sky metal could be rare, difficult to obtain, and charged with meaning. The find puts Sanxingdui into a wider ancient pattern, people noticing unusual natural materials, recognizing that they were special, and bringing them into ritual or elite contexts. Number seven, when bows replaced otletles. Guess how old the bow and arrow is in North America? It may seem like one of those technologies that was simply always there. But in North America, it arrived after a much older hunting system, the otletle and dart. An otletle is a spear thrower. It gives the arm extra leverage and sends a dart with much more force than a hand-thrown spear. For thousands of years, that was a major weapon system. The problem with dating the use of these objects is that the best evidence is organic. Wooden bows, arrows, darts, shafts, otletles. But a team from several universities built a database of 140 radiocarbon dates from 136 well-preserved organic weapons across Western North America. These weapons span roughly the last 10,000 years. Then they modeled the dates to see when bow technology appears and how quickly it spreads. The modeled dates give a surprisingly sharp result. Bow technology appears in both northern and southern regions of North America around 1,400 years ago. But people didn't adopt it the same way everywhere. In the south, across northern Mexico, California, and the southwest, the bow rapidly and almost completely replaced the otletle. It was a complete disruption. The bow offered clear advantages in accuracy, range, rate of fire, and versatility. In the north, bow and otletle coexisted for more than 1,000 years, so the older weapon was not immediately discarded. It may have remained useful in certain seasons, environments, or kinds of hunting. The new timeline makes the weapon shift much clearer, and it contradicts a commonly held belief that bows and arrows go back thousands of years in the Americas. Number six, the city where equality grew. When we think about the first great ancient cities of the world, we often picture inequality getting worse as the cities got bigger. Wealth gathers around rulers and elites. Mohenjo-Daro does not fit that model very well. This was one of the great cities of the Harappan civilization, flourishing roughly 2600 to 1900 BCE. It had organized streets, brick-lined drains, public infrastructure, civic amenities, and hundreds of houses. What it does not have is an obvious royal palace, or giant statues of rulers, no lavish tombs full of gold. And there are the houses, which have been noticed to be roughly equal in size. Researchers from the University of York and the University of Cambridge tried to measure the house sizes more systematically. They used old excavation records to calculate Gini coefficients for residence areas. A Gini coefficient is a way of measuring inequality. Zero would mean all the houses are the same size. Higher numbers mean bigger differences in the house sizes. The highest inequality score is one. Across Mohenjo-Daro as a whole, the figure was 0.44. That is well below highly stratified sites such as Knossos at 0.86, or Palenque at 0.75. It's also below contemporaneous West Asian cities such as Ur and Ugarit, which score above 0.6. In one excavated neighborhood, DKG South, the researchers could separate the buildings by period. Around 2500 BCE, the median residence area there was at a Gini coefficient of 0.39. Over time, the inequality measure fell. By about 2100 BCE, it was down to 0.23, close to what archaeologists often see in egalitarian societies. This suggests that as this part of Mohenjo-Daro developed, houses became more similar in size. The city was not shrinking into poverty while everyone was becoming equally poor. No, it was growing, organizing itself, and providing people with more access to the city infrastructure more broadly. That fits what archaeologists have noticed elsewhere at the site. Brick-lined drains run through neighborhoods. Public infrastructure appears across the settlement rather than clustering only around elite zones. Indus seals and standardized weights were not restricted to a royal court. Usually, we expect economic growth to bring wider inequality. Mohenjo-Daro points the other way. There was a huge ancient city where growth, productivity, and increasing complexity correspond with a more equal distribution of residential space. Number 5, Stonehenge's Scottish Altar Stone. At the center of Stonehenge, on Salisbury Plain in southern England, lies the Altar Stone, a sandstone megalith weighing about 6,000 kilograms, or more than 13,000 pounds. Previous work had already pointed to the Orcadian Basin in northeast Scotland as the source of the sandstone, roughly 700 kilometers, or about 435 miles, away. That's an astonishing distance. But the Orcadian Basin is huge, and the source location still needed narrowing down. Well, a new study was able to do that by looking at tiny mineral grains inside the sandstone, especially detrital zircons. Zircon crystals can preserve age signatures from the rocks they originally came from. If you compare the age pattern in the Altar Stone with what you find in the sandstone outcrops in Scotland, you can discover the closest geological fingerprint. Well, the closest match was Sarklet in Caithness, on the mainland of far northeast Scotland. Other northern mainland Orcadian Basin sources, including Bremar, Kirtimi, and Port Scara, also match well. More southerly candidates would make a glacial transport story easier, but their zircon signatures were weaker. The team also tested ice. Could glaciers have carried the stone south as a natural erratic? A glacial route would shorten the human part of the journey. In one possible model, ice could move material southeast toward Dogger Bank in the North Sea, cutting the remaining human transport from about 435 miles to about 250 miles, 400 kilometers. But the closest geological match, Caithness, does not produce an easy glacial route to Stonehenge. Dogger Bank was covered by sea before the Altar Stone likely arrived at Stonehenge. So the Altar Stone now has a much clearer source location, Sarklet in nearby Caithness, at the far northeastern edge of mainland Scotland. Ice may have helped part of the way, but the models do not carry the stone to Salisbury Plain. That means the explanation for transport is probably to be sought in human ingenuity. Number four, Plague Teeth in Jordan. The Plague of Justinian, named after the famous emperor who ruled the Eastern Roman Empire, began in 541 CE and marked the start of what scholars call the first pandemic, which lasted in repeated waves until about 750. Historical sources describe the disease appearing first at Plutium in northern Egypt and then spreading through the Eastern Roman Empire, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East. But there has been a strange gap in the evidence. Genetic evidence for the plague from the bodies of its victims had been found in Europe, but not in the Eastern Mediterranean, close to where the outbreak was first recorded. A mass grave at Jerash, ancient Gerasa in Jordan, supplied the missing kind of evidence. Jerash was a major Greco-Roman and Byzantine city. The mass grave held more than 200 people in abandoned chambers of the city's old hippodrome, a chariot racing arena that had long since stopped functioning as a racetrack. The grave dates to about 550 to 660. Plague is difficult to identify from bones alone because it doesn't leave distinctive skeletal lesions, so the team turned to teeth. Dental pulp is full of blood vessels, and if a person had plague bacteria circulating in the blood near death, pathogen DNA can sometimes survive there. The researchers first used proteomics to screen for possible plague proteins. After that, they extracted ancient DNA and sequenced genomes from selected samples. They recovered Yersinia pestis DNA, that's a bacterium, from five individuals. The genomes were highly similar to one another and clustered with other first pandemic plague lineages. This is the first genomic evidence of plague in the eastern Mediterranean during the first pandemic. And Jerash is only about 330 kilometers, or 205 miles, from Pelusium. The written history of Justinian's plague now has molecular evidence from the region where the pandemic first enters the record. Number three, we're getting close to the top. The boats in stone. Bronze Age boat carvings are famous in Scandinavia. There are more than 20,000 of them. Depictions of long hulls cut into rock, sometimes with single lines, sometimes double lines, sometimes with the space between the lines hollowed out. But similar boat images also appear much farther south, in northwest Iberia, especially northern Portugal and southwest Galicia. A team from universities in Britain, Sweden, Portugal, and Spain wanted to ascertain whether those Iberian boats are local nautical carvings or part of a wider Atlantic tradition. So they recorded the Iberian carvings with high-resolution digital methods. Some sites already had 3D models, but not good enough to settle the interpretive questions. The new work used laser scanning. One scanner captured about 480,000 measurement points per second, fine enough to bring out shallow carving marks and surface details. The team compared the Iberian carvings with Scandinavian boat imagery, and they found significant similarities in boat types, boat technology, and associated symbols, including curved hulls, steering oars, masts, rigging, and mushroom or colt axe-like shapes. The similarities constitute evidence that the Iberian examples are of a late Bronze Age date, about 1300 to 800 BCE. The GIS analysis showed that nearly all the Iberian sites, even some far inland, had a visual or physical relationship with navigable water, the ocean, major rivers, or routes that could connect to them. This ties them to the Atlantic world of seafaring and metal exchange, especially copper and tin. Those carvings indicate that northwest Iberia existed in a much larger maritime world along Atlantic Europe, where boat technology, metals, symbols, and ideas could travel very long distances. In parts of southern China and southeast Asia, some ancient communities placed their dead in wooden coffins, often carved from a single tree, and set or suspended them high on cliff faces, from hundreds to more than 1,000 feet above the ground. Historical records associate the hanging coffins with the Bo people of southwest China, but after the Ming Dynasty, the coffin-hanging Bo fade from the written sources. Today, communities identified as Bo still live in Yunnan, and the question is whether they are ancestrally connected to the ancient people who placed coffins high above the rivers and valleys. Well, in a recent study, researchers tested that question by studying ancient DNA from hanging coffin burials in Yunnan and Guangxi in southern China. Then they compared those results with DNA from present-day Bo people in Yunnan, and with ancient log coffin burials in northwestern Thailand. And the answer is, yes, present-day Bo people appear to carry a substantial amount of ancestry from ancient hanging coffin practitioners. That is the core discovery here. A burial custom known from cliffs, caves, and historical memory can now be tied to living people through DNA. The study also gives the tradition a deeper and wider history. Many of the ancient hanging coffin individuals in southern China were genetically similar to one another, and their deeper ancestry points backward towards southeastern coastal China, where the earliest known evidence for the custom appears around 1600 BCE. And then we learn that some Chinese hanging coffin groups and some Thai log coffin groups shared genetic components with these people too, which means the similarities in burial custom were not only a matter of style. There were real population connections across southern China and mainland southeast Asia. For a long time, people could see them hanging from cliffs, but the people who made them were not known for certain. Ancient DNA helped us to determine that the Bo are not just loosely associated with the hanging coffins in later tradition. They appear to preserve a real ancestral link to the people who practiced this dramatic form of burial. And number one, Karnak's island origins. Karnak is the greatest temple complex of ancient Egypt. Today, the Temple of Amun stands near Luxor, about 500 meters, or roughly 1600 feet, east of the modern Nile. But the Nile has not always run where it runs now. Its channels shifted, its floodplain changed, and that means the early landscape of Karnak has been surprisingly hard to reconstruct. But a team, led from the University of Southampton, carried out the first comprehensive geoarchaeological survey of the area. They collected data from 61 sediment cores, with the deepest going down 11.65 meters, about 38 feet. Many of those cores contained ceramic fragments which helped date the layers. The team also used wider regional coring data and optically stimulated luminescence states to build a fuller picture of the ancient floodplain. What they found was that Karnak was built on a segment of river terrace surrounded by Nile channels. The early site seems to have stood like an island in the floodplain. Permanent occupation became possible after about 2520 BCE, give or take 420 years, probably during the Old Kingdom. Interestingly, Egyptian creation traditions often imagined the first land emerging from the waters as a primeval mound. The study doesn't prove that people chose Karnak for that reason, but the physical landscape now makes that connection plausible. Before Karnak became a vast temple complex, it may have looked like sacred land rising out of the Nile itself. This would give greater significance to their choice of this particular location. So there you have them, my personal picks for the most interesting historical discoveries of the past year. Which one surprised you the most? Did I miss a discovery that should have made the list? Let me know in the comments below. And if you enjoy this kind of content, where history, science, and the ancient world meet, don't forget to like, subscribe, and share. Thanks for watching. You might like my little e-booklet, Why Ancient History Matters. It's designed to persuade people that the subject is important, even in the modern world. You might also wish to use it to help spread the word. So feel free to share it with someone you know. It's free for anyone who wants it. I've left a link in the description box below the video for you to grab a copy. Catch you later.