Topic
The study of human skeletal and dental remains from archaeological sites to reconstruct diet, health, and behaviour in past populations.
Researchers led by Université de Montréal found 45 people from Montreal's Notre-Dame Cemetery consistent with 100% European ancestry, mostly French. The result tests accounts of settler-Indigenous mixing in New France, for one burial ground only.
Reality
University of Nottingham archaeologists dated the restart of Peak District lead mining to the mid-seventh century from lead in childhood tooth enamel. Centuries of re-smelting had erased the usual industrial traces, so the evidence is teeth from three cemeteries.
Perspective Coverage
3 publishersReality
Researchers on the BODY-POLITICS project found traumatic injuries on 12 of nearly 200 people whose remains were left in Scandinavian homes over 1,500 years. At least eight were hurt deliberately, though who struck them, and where, the bones leave open.
Reality
Marianne Hem Eriksen's team found at least 12 people wounded around the time of death among 192 bones buried at Iron and Viking Age homes in Scandinavia. Two females and a child are among them, though skulls kept for years mean a burial spot may not be where the harm happened.
Reality
Roselyn Campbell of Purdue found likely fatal fractures on 18 of 46 First Dynasty skulls from Abydos that Petrie had taken for natural damage. The result gives Petrie's 1920s suspicion of retainer sacrifice physical support, though only for the skulls he kept from hundreds of graves.
Perspective Coverage
8 publishersReality
Corina Kellner's team found four mummies buried beside a Wari temple at Peru's Huaca del Loro, apart from the site's cemetery. She takes the placement as a hint that the Nasca supported the Wari, an idea that pending CT, DNA and isotope results will test.
Reality
Padua-led researchers found flat head syndrome in 11 of 26 Picene skulls from 9th-8th century BC Italy, the country's earliest known cases. The condition predates 1990s back-sleeping advice, though one small cemetery cannot show how much that advice adds to modern cases.
Reality
A woman buried face down in a Henan cemetery had her nasal bones cut back to half the bridge and lived, and the team that found her among 300 burials argues the grave itself points to punishment.
Reality
Chinese law codes prescribed cutting off a livestock thief's nose, and the texts record thousands of cases. A skull from a Henan cemetery, healed and remodelled around a wide nasal opening, suggests one of those sentences was carried out.
Reality
A team at Nicolaus Copernicus University ran isotopes, DNA and textile analysis on a 17th century Polish burial, and the sequence they report puts the padlock on the toe at interment and the sickle at the throat only after someone dug the grave open again.
Reality