Ancient Beat

🧐 Ancient Beat #216: Language, rulers, and meticulous Neanderthals

A new interpretation of ancient coins suggests that a powerful Iron Age ruler of southern Britain, traditionally assumed to be male, was actually a…

Nov 7 • James Fleischmann

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October 2026

🎃 Ancient Beat #215: Denisovans, Polynesian migration, and (banned) pagan worship

A new analysis of prehistoric human fossils from the Xujiayao archaeological site in northern China has identified a skull fragment and jaw fragment as…

Oct 31 • James Fleischmann

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🧐 Ancient Beat #214: Shipwrecks, footprints, and fingerprints on the Terracotta Army

Fingerprints preserved in China’s famous Terracotta Army suggest that women and children may have helped manufacture the thousands of life-sized figures…

Oct 24 • James Fleischmann

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🧐 Ancient Beat #213: Observatories, basecamps, and hidden chambers

A geophysical investigation of the Grotta delle Veneri, or Cave of Venuses, near Parabita in southern Italy’s Puglia region has identified several…

Oct 17 • James Fleischmann

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🧐 Ancient Beat #212: Sunken cities, tall palaces, and Neanderthal woodworking

A study of 597 wooden remains and impressions from Abric Romaní, a rock shelter near Barcelona, Spain, reveals that Neanderthals manufactured…

Oct 10 • James Fleischmann

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🧐 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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