Professor Necmi Karul, Coordinator of the Stone Hills Project, explained on social media that the internal design of the structures unearthed in the new dig suggests they were residential and “used as dwellings” in the site’s second phase, approximately the early 9th millennium BCE.

This challenges the original theory that Göbekli Tepe was not a settlement, but an isolated temple complex used for ceremonial gatherings. The discovery of domestic buildings instead suggests people lived here rather than just gathering for ceremonial events.

Neanderthals are largely associated with colder climates across Eurasia. But researchers know that both Homo sapiens and Neanderthals moved through nearby Southwest Asia between about 100,000 and 50,000 years ago, and Arabia was a crossroads between Africa, Europe and Asia during the Ice Age.

Although no Neanderthal bones have ever been found in Arabia, a new study on stone tools in Arabia suggests Neanderthals roamed this warmer region 60,000 to 50,000 years ago. The study, published in Quaternary Science Reviews, links Neanderthal tool-flaking methods to tools from a site called Jebel Katefeh-1 (JKF-1), near an ancient lake in Saudi Arabia's Nefud Desert

The research is part of the international project Long-term Land Use Dynamics within the Areas of Prehistoric Ritual Places, which focuses on changes in prehistoric ritual landscapes. The research is being carried out in cooperation with the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen, Charles University and the University of Hradec Králové.

Press release looks to be ad-free and I couldn’t decide which bit was most important, so I won’t paste contents

Archaeologists have discovered around 25 turtle figurines believed to be up to 16,500 years old at an excavation site in northwestern Türkiye.

The objects were uncovered at the Gedikkaya Hill and In Cave Archaeological Excavation Site in the Inhisar district of Bilecik province.

Excavations were conducted between May 18 and July 18 by a 14-member team led by Professor Deniz Sari of Bilecik Seyh Edebali University's Department of Archaeology, on behalf of the Culture and Tourism Ministry.

The figurines were made from limestone, with some covered in clay. The largest measures approximately 30 centimeters long and 20 centimeters wide.

Radiocarbon dating of the archaeological context placed the finds between 14,500 and 11,200 BC, during the Epipaleolithic period. Researchers believe the figurines were produced for ritual purposes and deliberately placed inside the cave.

I’m tired of running into book reviews that go something along the lines of “This isn’t my normal genre but I picked it up because x….3 stars.”

These reviews are numerous and, in my opinion, unhelpful for other users and insensitive towards authors. They treat the review system as if it’s somehow calibrating a personal taste metric instead of contributing to a universal judgement of quality.

I would love to see a book review community/software that is more thoughtful about structuring ratings relative to certain genre/taste profiles.

Fifty-six million years ago, Earth’s forests reached a tipping point. They had grown dense, lush canopies at the start of one of Earth’s most intense episodes of greenhouse warming. But those canopies began to thin.

As global temperatures rose by as much as 11 degrees Fahrenheit (6 degrees Celsius), heat and drought put stress on the forests, killing large numbers of trees. Forest canopies opened, exposing the ground to more sunlight and altering the movement of water through the landscape. 

In southern Wyoming, ferns briefly flourished where relatives of elms, walnuts, dawn redwood and avocado trees once thrived. Then palms and other warmth-loving plants spread northward.

In a new study in the journal Science, my colleagues and I show how those Wyoming forests lost 60% of their canopy during this period, known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, or PETM, and how it took them well over 100,000 years to recover.

Research Article (Paywalled)

I have some scoop neck button down dresses and rompers that I don’t really like the neckline on. Anyone have a good resources for modifying necklines? Any recommendations that are especially easy to go to from a scoop neck? (V neck comes to mind?).

This sort of neckline

A. Kiss et al., Cascading continental-scale floods across Europe in 1342–1343, Nature (2026).
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10888-8

The TU website has no ads etc.

Link

The pre-Hispanic field systems of La Mojana in the Colombian Caribbean are so vast that they can be seen from a plane at high altitude. Their canals and raised fields—in use from the first centuries B.C. until the 11th century A.D.—cover an astonishing 500,000 hectares (1.2 million acres), roughly the same size as Grand Canyon National Park or three times the size of London.

It has traditionally been assumed that powerful rulers must have ordered and managed such an ambitious infrastructure project because of its complexity and the amount of work thought to be involved.

In a study published in Communications Sustainability, however, a University of Cambridge-led archaeological team argues that the work was most likely locally led, cooperative and much faster than previously assumed.

The findings are historically important but also offer hope to Colombians today who are suffering from a water management crisis linked to climate change, intensive farming and policy failure.

My website is html/css only right now and I would prefer to keep it that way even though this is simple to implement with js.

In a study published in the journal Evolution, researchers from the American Museum of Natural History and Princeton University used mathematical models to examine how body size evolved among vertebrates. Their results show that energy use and physiology can account for the range of sizes seen in mammals, birds, and turtles. Those same factors, however, cannot explain why even the smallest dinosaurs other than birds remained relatively large.

The researchers instead suggest that ecology may have imposed a lower size limit on dinosaurs. In particular, competition with early small mammals could have prevented dinosaurs from moving into the mouse-sized and sparrow-sized niches that are filled by many vertebrates today.

"Everyone loves a giant dinosaur," said study co-author Roger Benson, the Macaulay Curator of Dinosaur Paleobiology at the Museum. "But we decided to look at the other end of the scale. The absence of tiny dinosaurs may be just as interesting as the existence of giant ones. We already knew that dinosaurs prevented mammals from evolving to large sizes before the end-Cretaceous mass extinction. Here we suggest that mammals in turn prevented dinosaurs from evolving to small sizes."

The structure of modern society has allowed our community muscles to atrophy leaving us isolated and unsure where to start to make change.

Outsourcing Noticing. We are not acclimated to keeping an eye out for solvable issues in our area. We generally expect the city to notice and address issues (we pay them to, after all). Our role is to complain to the city if an issue gets too noticeable or annoying.

Outsourcing Problem Solving. We are not acclimated to noticing problems. We are also not acclimated to solving them. Solving problems usually includes knowing who has the right expertise, who has the right equipment, who has the right raw materials, transport vehicles, etc. When we outsource these functions to the city completely we do not need to know this information, so we typically lose the connections that would have been necessary to coordinate, or even imagine coordinating complex projects like water management, food management, or electrical grids.

This state of affairs is fine as long as the cities we have outsourced our knowledge to continue to function, but in order to build communities that are resilient to political upheaval I think we need to make a concerted effort to regain these lost skills. Teach your kids to notice problems and identify potential solutions. Try to understand where your water and electricity comes from, at least on a basic level. Get to know someone who works at the power plant. Find out who has what skills in your community, and think of what skills you might have to offer them. By practicing noticing and problem solving, we build strong community connections that better equip us to react to change safely and effectively.

I’m not a programmer so excuse my poor terminology. I have some scripts set up in google apps script for communicating with a couple apps/programs (to-do lists, health data syncs to update local spreadsheet). I’d like to move these off of google but am not sure where to start. Are there paid services that offer a similar experience for writing little programs to route my data around?

DOI: https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2026.10371

Summary:

This study examines clay fragments found at Çemka Höyük, a Pre-Pottery Neolithic site in Mardin, Türkiye (tenth millennium BC). Analysis of mineral inclusions in the clay matrix indicates that these fragments may have been deliberately fired, representing an early example of ceramic technology in South-west Asia. The diversity of forms identified and their likely uses suggest, the authors argue, a formative phase in ceramic innovation during which the properties and potential applications of clay were explored by the local community and adopted and adapted within existing social and economic traditions in advance of widespread application in the seventh millennium BC.

An ancient shipwreck carrying an estimated 600–650 commercial amphorae has been discovered off the coast of the Greek island of Andros, in a significant underwater archaeological find dating to the late 5th and early 4th century BC.

The Ephorate of Underwater Antiquities of Greece’s Ministry of Culture carried out an underwater inspection after receiving a tip from a private individual. The wreck was located at a depth of 39 to 44 meters (128–144 feet), where archaeologists identified the cargo of an ancient merchant vessel consisting of pointed-bottom transport amphorae.

Research article (Paywall)

Researchers from Trinity College Dublin have recovered and analyzed the first ancient smallpox virus genomes ever identified in the Americas, providing the strongest direct evidence to date that the disease was introduced through European colonization.

Journal Article

Snippet:

One of the unknown ancestors, which the researchers refer to as a ghost ancestor, interbred with modern humans in Africa prior to 50,000 years ago, before the most recent migration of Homo sapiens out of Africa into Europe and Asia. These genes comprise around 1% of the genomes of modern humans, comparable to the amount of Neanderthal DNA in the human genome. That unknown hominin lineage actually split off from the modern human lineage around the same time that Neanderthals and Denisovans diverged around 800,000 years ago, though they interbred with modern humans earlier.

The other mysterious ancestor — what the researchers call a super-archaic ancestor — was a hominin descended from a 1.8 million-year-old lineage that interbred with Denisovans in Eurasia, likely more than 200,000 years ago. Denisovans later shared some of the super-archaic DNA with modern humans through interbreeding with Homo sapiens.