Enlarge / Blasting taking place at the fossil-rich site. (credit: Bureau of Land Management )

Blasting has begun in an area known as “Community Pit #1” near Las Cruces, New Mexico, as part of a three-year effort by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to level dangerous high walls left in a once heavily mined pit (among other work). But the site is the only known location of certain fossils in the entire state, and some experts question whether the BLM is doing all that it can to balance maintaining public safety and preserving the fossils it is tasked with protecting.

In the Pit

The Community Pit is an area of approximately 85 acres near Prehistoric Trackways National Monument , which hosts a large range of vertebrate footprints. It became a source of building material in 1969, but this use ended in 2007. Scars from several decades of mining remain in the form of very high, very unstable rock walls. Current remediation efforts started because the “BLM observed an increase of visitors climbing upon and underneath undercuts and high walls,” explained William Wight, the BLM Las Cruces District spokesperson. “Due to increased reporting of this dangerous situation in late 2022, the BLM Las Cruces District Office made the Community Pit #1 public health and safety project a top district priority.”

The scope of that project involves “ blasting , recontouring, seeding, and re-establishment of vegetation” in about 50 acres of the Community Pit. Blasting will largely impact the top layer of sediment making up the 150-foot walls. It is the rock layer lower in the pit—a geologic formation known as the Robledo Mountain Formation—that contains the fossils unique to the Community Pit: resting and burrowing traces made by jellyfish and horseshoe crabs from the Early Permian (approximately 290 million years or so ago). This is the only known location of jellyfish and horseshoe crab traces in New Mexico.

Enlarge / The cranium of an individual with mosaic Turner syndrome from an Iron Age site in Somerset, UK. (credit: K. Anastasiadou et al. 2024)

Turner syndrome is a genetic condition in which a (female) person has only one X chromosome instead of two. Scientists have used a new computational method for precisely measuring sex chromosomes to identify the first prehistoric person with this syndrome dating back some 2,500 years ago, according to a recent paper published in the journal Communications Biology. The team identified four other individuals with sex chromosomes outside the usual XX or XY designations: an early medieval individual with Jacobs syndrome (XYY) and three people from various periods with Klinefelter syndrome (XXY). They also identified an Iron Age infant with Down syndrome .

"It’s hard to see a full picture of how these individuals lived and interacted with their society, as they weren’t found with possessions or in unusual graves, but it can allow some insight into how perceptions of gender identity have evolved over time," said co-author Kakia Anastasiadou , a graduate student at the Francis Crick Institute.

Added co-author Rick Schulting, an archaeologist at the University of Oxford, “The results of this study open up exciting new possibilities for the study of sex in the past, moving beyond binary categories in a way that would be impossible without the advances being made in ancient DNA analysis."

Enlarge / The site at casas del Turuñuelo, with 1 marking the courtyard. (credit: Iborra Eres, et al. )

Whether it was to appease a deity or honor the dead, ritual animal sacrifice was widespread in the ancient world. But there is a region where it appears that hardly any of these rituals occurred for an extended period of time.

Until now, the archaeological record was almost devoid of any evidence of significant animal sacrifices in the Mediterranean region during the Iron Age. Hardly any written sources describing the practice have been found. While the exact reason that we don’t see any evidence remains unknown, archaeologists have now unearthed more details on one of the only sites sacrifices were known to happen in the Iron Age Mediterranean, a location in western Spain.

The bones of Casas del Turuñuelo now tell us more from beyond the grave than they ever have. “The 52 animals deposited in the courtyard of Casas de Turuñuelo represent a series of episodes of slaughter,” a team of archaeologists said in a study recently published in PLOS ONE.

Enlarge / Drawing of a trade expedition to Punt during the reign of Queen Hatshepsut. Note the presence of baboons on board the lower ship. (credit: Nastasic )

One of the most enduring mysteries within archaeology revolves around the identity of Punt, an otherworldly “land of plenty” revered by the ancient Egyptians. Punt had it all—fragrant myrrh and frankincense, precious electrum (a mixed alloy of gold and silver) and malachite, and coveted leopard skins, among other exotic luxury goods.

Despite being a trading partner for over a millennium, the ancient Egyptians never disclosed Punt’s exact whereabouts except for vague descriptions of voyages along what’s now the Red Sea. That could mean anywhere from southern Sudan to Somalia and even Yemen.

Now, according to a recent paper published in the journal eLife, Punt may have been the same as another legendary port city in modern-day Eritrea, known as Adulis by the Romans. The conclusion comes from a genetic analysis of a baboon that was mummified during ancient Egypt’s Late Period (around 800 and 500 BCE). The genetics indicate the animal originated close to where Adulis would be known to come into existence centuries later.

Enlarge / The distinctive ruins at Nan Madol. (credit: Patrick Nunn / Wikimedia Commons )

Even by the standards of enigmatic ancient ruins, Nan Madol is strange. Constructed primarily of "logs" made of volcanic rock, the site consists of dozens of small artificial islands separated by canals that are flushed by the tides. It's built on the shores of the Micronesian island of Pohnpei, which has an enigmatic history, seemingly remaining unpopulated as islands to the north and south were settled during the Polynesian expansion.

Now, a team of researchers is offering a single explanation that accounts for many of these oddities: The island of Pohnpei is slowly sinking, taking evidence of an earlier settlement beneath the waves. And, if their estimate of its subsidence is accurate, Nan Madol would have been above the waves at the time of its construction.

Ups and downs

The human expansion into the scattered islands of the Pacific started over 3,000 years ago and primarily took place upon two parallel routes north and south of the equator. The southern route was peopled by the ancestors of the Polynesians, while the northern route was derived from people who likely originated in the Philippines. There were islands between the two along the equator, but those weren't settled until roughly a thousand years later when the descendants of the first wave expanded from the islands they had initially populated.

Enlarge / Archaeologists found a crude graffiti drawing of a penis accompanied by a personal insult at the ancient Roman fort Vindolanda. (credit: Vindolana Charitable Trust)

Archaeologists excavating the remains of a Roman auxiliary fort in the UK recently made a surprising and rather hilarious find : a small stone carved with the unmistakable image of penis—basically an ancient Roman d**k pic, accompanied by a crude insulting message directed at someone the carver clearly disliked.

The Vindolanda site is located south of the defense fortification known as Hadrian's Wall . An antiquarian named William Camden recorded the existence of the ruins in a 1586 treatise. Over the next 200 years, many people visited the site, discovering a military bathhouse in 1702 and an altar in 1715. The Rev. Anthony Hedley began excavating the site in 1814, but he died before he had the chance to record what he found for posterity. Another altar found in 1914 confirmed that the fort had been called Vindolanda.

Serious archaeological excavation at the site began in the 1930s under the leadership of Eric Birley , whose sons and grandson continued the work after his death, right up to the present day. The oxygen-deprived conditions of the deposits (some of which extend six meters, or 19 feet, into the earth)  mean that the recovered artifacts are remarkably well-preserved. These include wooden writing tablets and over a hundred boxwood combs, which would have disintegrated long ago in more oxygen-rich conditions.