Ancient Beat

🧐 Ancient Beat #211: Stone circles, butchered bones, and the first settlement of Paris

A roughly 65-foot-long stone-and-timber wall uncovered beneath the Hôtel-Dieu hospital on Paris’s Île de la Cité may be part of the defenses of Lutetia…

Oct 3 • James Fleischmann

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September 2026

🧐 Ancient Beat #210: Peace, education, and the first intact burial contexts at Göbeklitepe

The first two intact burial contexts found at Göbeklitepe in southeastern Turkey are changing interpretations of the site’s scattered human remains…

Sep 26 • James Fleischmann

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🧐 Ancient Beat #209: Denisovans, lightning strikes, and Machu Picchu’s unknown infrastructure

Bianfu Cave in Yunnan Province, southwestern China, has produced seven Denisovan fossils—two skull fragments, four teeth, and part of a forearm…

Sep 19 • James Fleischmann

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🧐 Ancient Beat #208: Big rocks, psychoactive nuts, and the peopling of Ireland

Rock art identified in eight caves in southwest Ireland may push known human activity on the island back to at least 15,000 years ago—about 5,000 years…

Sep 12 • James Fleischmann

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🧐 Ancient Beat #207: Rituals, hoards, and hips

A new analysis of the pelvis of Homo floresiensis, the diminutive human relative discovered on Flores, Indonesia, suggests the species walked more like…

Sep 5 • James Fleischmann

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August 2026

🧐 Ancient Beat #206: Cryptic markings, astronomical sanctuaries, and lots of statues

Eleven engraved obsidian arrowheads dating to roughly 9,000–8,000 years ago have been identified at Tepecik-Çiftlik in central Anatolia, Turkey…

Aug 29 • James Fleischmann

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🧐 Ancient Beat #205: Symbolic art, cow-bears, and really big Denisovans

Two fossilized Denisovan leg bones dredged decades ago from the Penghu Channel in the Taiwan Strait suggest some members of this archaic human group…

Aug 22 • James Fleischmann

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🧐 Ancient Beat #204: Star gazing, hunting strategies, and stones shaped like people

Ancient DNA suggests Ice Age hunters deliberately targeted female woolly mammoths rather than killing males and females equally. Genetic analysis…

Aug 8 • James Fleischmann

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🧐 Ancient Beat #203: Big footprints, tiny bird carvings, and Mesolithic sailors

Twenty-one hominin footprints preserved at GaJi10 in northern Kenya’s Koobi Fora Formation capture at least eight individuals crossing a muddy lakeshore…

Aug 1 • James Fleischmann

July 2026

🧐 Ancient Beat #202: Fish farming, female warriors, and visual syntax in cave art

Analysis of 500 painted and engraved motifs in nine caves across Spain’s Basque Country suggests that Paleolithic artists followed a shared visual…

Jul 25 • James Fleischmann

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🧐 Ancient Beat #201: Signatures, metropolises, and ceremonial landscapes

The first detailed ground survey of El Yesal, deep within the Balam Kú Biosphere Reserve in Campeche, Mexico, has mapped one of the largest Maya cities…

Jul 18 • James Fleischmann

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🧐 Ancient Beat #200: Ancient fossil collectors, shared Neanderthal/sapiens cultures, and the fall of the megalith builders

Finds from Üçağızlı II Cave on Turkey’s Mediterranean coast suggest remarkable cultural continuity between Neanderthals and the Homo sapiens who arrived…

Jul 11 • James Fleischmann

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