Anthropology.net

The Polynesian “Long Pause” lasted 1,700 years. Then, around 900 CE, a mega-drought hit Samoa and Tonga just as rain increased eastward. New sediment data suggests thirsty islands, not myth, sent voyagers into the Pacific. #Archaeology #Polynesia #Paleoclimate https://www.anthropology.net/p/the-long-pause-that-ended-in-drought

Soil temp, not just rainfall, may have driven the shifting geography of millet farming in Neolithic East Asia. A 3°C mid-Holocene cooling compressed cultivation zones and pushed farming southward. #Neolithic #Archaeobotany #Paleoanthropology https://www.anthropology.net/p/the-ground-went-cold-soil-temperature

A new study drilled 26 sediment cores beneath an ancient Sudanese capital and found 12,500 years of Nile history. The geology explains why Napata, heart of the Kushite empire, lasted over a millennium. #Archaeology #AncientNubia #Kush https://www.anthropology.net/p/what-the-nile-built-at-jebel-barkal

A fire in Bronze Age Spain ~1450 BC destroyed a settlement — and accidentally preserved something almost never found: the actual wooden frame of a loom, still loaded with weights. New study in Antiquity reconstructs it. #Archaeology #BronzeAge #TextileHistory https://www.anthropology.net/p/a-bronze-age-loom-preserved-by-fire

New research overturns the myth of perfectly equal hunter-gatherers. Even the most “egalitarian” societies navigate inequality using subtle political tools that protect autonomy. Equality, it turns out, is hard-won. #Anthropology #HumanOrigins #Foragers #Inequality https://www.anthropology.net/p/when-equality-has-edges-rethinking