Researchers have extracted DNA from a 50,000-year-old tooth belonging to an African antelope, setting a record for the oldest DNA ever retrieved from sub-Saharan Africa, a new study reports.

The finding suggests that DNA preservation in sub-Saharan Africa is possible for tens of thousands of years. In most cases, the region's hot climate breaks down the molecule and prevents researchers from understanding the evolution of numerous species, including ancient human ancestors and relatives.

While some temperate regions are known for preserving ancient human DNA — for instance, the Sima de los Huesos ("Pit of Bones") in Spain preserved DNA from a mysterious relative of modern humans that lived around 400,000 years ago — the sub-Saharan African climate is less forgiving. The oldest human DNA from sub-Saharan Africa is about 18,000 years old and was discovered in bones found in a rock shelter in Tanzania. And the oldest sub-Saharan animal DNA is just 9,300 years old, from an extinct antelope in South Africa.

In the new study, researchers tested whether DNA could be successfully extracted from ancient skeletons even older than that. By analyzing more than 300 teeth from animals that lived in the past 110,000 years, they discovered that small amounts of DNA could be identified even in remains from the Late Pleistocene, the latter part of the last ice age.

In a study published online May 27 in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews, researchers extracted DNA from dozens of Holocene bovid specimens younger than 11,700 years old and from four Late Pleistocene bovid specimens between 12,000 and 50,000 years old. Although many of the teeth didn't yield DNA, a handful did. The oldest DNA the researchers found came from a partial molar from an African antelope called a mountain reedbuck (Redunca fulvorufula) discovered in Boomplaas Cave in southern South Africa. The other old DNA samples came from three extinct long-horned buffalos (Syncerus antiquus) ‪—‬ two that died 21,000 years ago and one that died 12,000 years ago.

"The 50,000-year-old DNA is exciting," study first author Deon de Jager, a paleogenomics expert at the University of Copenhagen, told Live Science in an email. "But I am myself skeptical of it, for two reasons."

The reedbuck DNA is significantly older than the next-oldest DNA the researchers retrieved, from the long-horned buffalo, de Jager explained, and the reedbuck specimen was contaminated with some human DNA, which they were able to remove. These two issues mean the 50,000-year-old antelope DNA result is not ironclad. However, since the publication of the study, the researchers have also sequenced the genome of a 42,000-year-old wildebeest from Ethiopia, suggesting DNA lasts a lot longer in Africa's climate than experts once thought.

"There is of course a limit to DNA preservation in Africa, but what it is, is not clear," de Jager said. "There are certainly parts of Africa where DNA will be preserved even better than from the sites we have surveyed. Deep caves with stable, low temperatures will certainly be good candidates, but also high-elevation sites where temperatures have been very low for a long time."

The Late Pleistocene teeth that de Jager and colleagues analyzed produced very low amounts of DNA, which is thought to have a half-life of about 521 years, meaning half of the DNA in a specimen disappears every 521 years until none is left. But the amount the researchers found is still useful, de Jager said.

The DNA is sufficient for identifying evolutionary lineages, de Jager added. If they can gather enough data, researchers might be able to compare gene flow and interbreeding among species and populations.

Although these results suggest that DNA analysis is possible for understanding the past 40,000 to 50,000 years of animal and human evolution in South Africa, we may never be able to extract DNA from ancient human relatives like Homo naledi, which went extinct around 240,000 years ago, or Paranthropus robustus, which died out around 1 million years ago.

"I think the chances of obtaining DNA from Homo naledi are very, very low, unfortunately," de Jager said. "One would have to get very lucky with an incredibly well-preserved skull with the petrous bone still present, which is the best bone for obtaining ancient DNA. To get DNA from something in Africa nearly 1 million years old would probably be impossible, as the conditions in Africa are just too harsh."

How much do you know about Earth's frosty past? Find out with our last ice age quiz!

Archaeologists have found five pairs of iron shackles at a 2,300-year-old Celtic site in France ‪—‬ a discovery that suggests the small settlement was frequented by metalsmiths and slave traders.

The "extremely rare" shackles were discovered in the town of Allonnes in France's Loire Valley in 2019, but the finds from the two-year-long excavation were announced to the public on July 9 in a translated statement from the French National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research (INRAP).

The settlement at Allonnes was established along with a religious complex in the third century B.C., according to the statement. Specialist artisans ‪—‬ including blacksmiths, coppersmiths, bronze workers and sheet-metal workers ‪—‬ plied their trade from small workshops, archaeologists found at Allonnes.

During the excavation, the team discovered a large number of high-quality metal objects — such as swords, spearheads, keys and horse harness fittings — but the iron shackles were a surprise because they are extremely rare for the time period. Excavators found a double-wrist restraint, an ankle restraint and three other portions of metal restraints.

The presence of shackles suggests that Allonnes may have been a hub for slave trading in the Late Iron Age (450 to 50 B.C.), according to the statement.

"The identification of restraints and weapons suggests a hierarchical social organization composed of dominant and subordinate groups — prisoners or slaves," Thierry Lejars, a specialist in Celtic metalwork, said in a translated interview with INRAP.

The Gauls, a loose association of Celtic tribes, were known to enslave prisoners of war, convicts and debtors, according to the statement, and they were often forced to work in the fields. These men, women and children then lost their rights and could be bought and sold by their owners. Because the Celts did not leave many historical records of their own, however, not much is known about the practice of slavery in pre-Roman Gaul. The shackles from Allonnes provide new insight into the lives of people who were typically invisible in historical accounts.

The small diameter of the wrist restraint ‪—‬ 2.4 inches (6 centimeters) ‪—‬ suggests it may have been used on a woman or a child, according to the statement. And the ankle restraint was over 2.2 pounds (1 kilogram), revealing the weight that enslaved people had to carry around.

Archaeologists also uncovered a religious sanctuary at Allonnes, along with offerings that included clothing and jewelry such as rings and amulets. Many of the offerings had been deliberately deformed or mutilated, likely to transform a mundane possession into a gift for the gods, the statement reported.

Hundreds of coins were also recovered at the site, and their mint dates spanned more than five centuries, Isabelle Bollard-Raineau, an ancient-coin expert with the French ministry of culture, said in the translated INRAP interview. About a third of the coins found at Allonnes had been filed, sheared or etched with a chisel.

"These mutilations reveal a ritual intention: the removal of the coin's commercial function in order to dedicate the object to the sacred, thereby ensuring the permanence of the offering," Bollard-Raineau said.

Allonnes was a significant Celtic site at the intersection of several major roads in ancient times, and the analysis of the metal finds has revealed important new information about some of the most powerless members of Gallic society.

See how much you know about the Celts with our Celtic quiz!

This unique helmet comes from the Elamite culture, an ancient civilization that flourished for nearly three millennia in what is now Iran. Likely worn by a warrior king more than 3,000 years ago, the helmet has been decorated with a large bird of prey that is swooping down over three divine figures.

The dome-shaped bronze helmet measures roughly 8.5 inches (21.6 centimeters) in diameter and has a thin, cutaway area on the front that would have gone over the wearer's eyebrows. Originally, a small projection would have extended down between them to cover the wearer's nose. Gold-covered silver studs line the edge of the helmet, and a bronze tube on the back likely once held a plume of feathers or hair.

The helmet, which is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was made by a master artisan of the Elamite culture, one of the earliest civilizations of the ancient Near East. The Elamites lived in what is now southwest Iran, along the eastern Persian Gulf, from roughly 2700 B.C. until they were conquered by the Persian Empire in 539 B.C. Elam was frequently at war with neighboring Mesopotamian cities, including Ur and Babylon, and archaeologists have found numerous examples of the culture's elaborate weapons and armor.

But this particular helmet is "a masterpiece of ancient art" that "has no parallels in either the representative art of the ancient Near East or from excavations," archaeologist Oscar White Muscarella wrote in a 1988 book about the ancient Near Eastern bronze and iron artifacts in The Met's collection. This helmet's unique shape and decorations make it stand out from other Elamite armor.

On the front of the helmet are three gold deities: two females and one male. The male deity carries a vessel with water cascading out of it, suggesting he is an Elamite water god. The two identical goddesses wear horned headdresses and jewelry, and they are holding up their hands in a gesture of prayer. A raptor is positioned vertically over the water god, possibly symbolizing the bird of prey of the battlefield that awaits the victims of the warrior king who wore the helmet, Charles K. Wilkinson, curator emeritus of Near Eastern art at The Met, wrote in a 1965 study of the object.

The helmet certainly would have been worn by someone of high rank in the Elamite culture, Muscarella and Wilkinson both wrote, but it was likely symbolic as well as functional. The representations of important deities were probably intended to ward off evil and conflict on the ancient battlefield.

For more stunning archaeological discoveries, check out our Astonishing Artifacts archives.

Can you put together last week's Astonishing Artifact?

Most archaeologists spend time digging in the dirt or piecing together broken artifacts or bones in the lab, attempting to make sense of the past in a painstakingly slow process. But others use that information — and a little ingenuity — to re-create the sights, sounds, smells and tastes of ancient societies through a practice called experimental archaeology.

In his book "Dinner with King Tut: How Rogue Archaeologists Are Re-creating the Sights, Sounds, Smells, and Tastes of Lost Civilizations" (Little, Brown and Co., 2025), author Sam Kean delves into the overloaded sensory world of experimental archaeology practitioners. Along the way, he learns to knap a stone tool like early Homo sapiens did, create an intricate hairstyle that would make a Roman woman proud, tattoo someone using ancient tools, play an Aztec ball game, and bake the kind of sourdough loaf that King Tut once ate.

Kean spoke with Live Science about his book, which was a finalist for the 2026 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award and was named one of The New Yorker's best books of 2025.

Related: Read an excerpt from Kean's book, "Dinner with King Tut."

Kristina Killgrove: What intrigued you about experimental archaeology?

Sam Kean: There was sort of a conflict within me because, on the one hand, I really love the questions that archaeology brings up. There's some big, meaty questions about who we are as a species, how we spread across the Earth, how we changed as we spread across the Earth ‪—‬ these really important, big questions about human history. But whenever I would go to an actual archaeological site, it just seemed to me like the most boring work I could imagine. It's just people sitting around in the dirt with toothbrushes or dental picks or whatever, picking up potsherds, and it just seemed so tedious to me.

Experimental archaeology seemed like a lot more lively, sensory-rich field because archaeologists in this field are actually doing things. They're re-creating stone tools, making ancient foods. You can smell the past. So it was just a lot more exciting way for me to get into archaeology.

KK: Tell me about your research process for this book. Did you "embed" with archaeologists and participate in their experiments?

SK: Each chapter is set in a different time and place, so you're really immersed in a day in the life of that person. There was a lot of reading about traditional archaeology and what we've learned from that, because we have learned a lot from it. But then I would go talk to experimental archaeologists and go through the process of brain-tanning leather or getting on a ship that they would have sailed on, and I just experienced it in the way that they're doing their research and experienced it more like people would have in the past too.

KK: Did you have a favorite experiment that you learned about or a favorite archaeologist you embedded with?

SK: There's a guy out in Utah who built a trebuchet — a giant medieval catapult. It was about 30 or 40 feet [9 to 12 meters] tall, I think. And we just spent a lovely day flinging these giant garden stones around at this palisade that he had built, as a stand-in for a fort, essentially. And we just spent a day flinging these huge stones at this fort and watching it smash in and splinter the wood and try to destroy this little fort. Getting to pull the trigger on this catapult — it was just like this majestic dragon coming to life, almost, as it started to fling these balls. And it was like a whip cracking of the sling as it would fling the stone out. That was just a really lovely memory, partly because everything worked properly that day.

A lot of the book was actually me floundering around, failing to complete the projects or figuring out what I was doing wrong. And I think that was a good learning method. I did learn a lot by flailing around, probably more than I would have had I gotten things correct the first time immediately. But it was nice when things went right every once in a while. And the catapult was a good example of that.

KK: That sounds so cool! And in the excerpt that we are publishing on Live Science from your book "Dinner with King Tut," you talk to people who used ancient Egyptian mummification techniques on a real human body. What did you learn from talking to these people? And did you get to try mummifying a body yourself?

SK: Not a body, but I did do a little mummification myself. I didn't know this before I started writing the book, but the Egyptians mummified a lot of animals, a huge variety of animals, dozens of different types, and on a big, big scale. There's one grave site they found with something like 4 million bird mummies. So there have been a fair number of archaeologists in modern times who have tried to — and succeeded in — mummifying different animals, even though the Egyptians didn't write down a whole lot about the process. We don't know if it was lost to time or if it was just sort of a guild secret where they didn't write things down. So they would do this to learn about the mummification process with animals.

But, of course, the thing that really intrigues us about ancient Egypt are the human mummies. And everyone thought we couldn't actually make a human mummy until two guys did in the '90s. It was one Egyptologist [Bob Brier] and the guy who was in charge of the Maryland state anatomy board [Ronn Wade], who got to decide where cadavers went that had been donated to science. He decided this was a worthwhile project.

The donor remains anonymous, but he was a 76-year-old man from Baltimore who had died of a heart attack. They went all out to be authentic for this project. They went to Egypt to get the mineral natron that they would have used to mummify him. They had ancient tools made, and they went through all the steps that were known in mummification and turned this person into a mummy.

KK: Did these researchers learn more than what is in the historical records? What did they learn from doing this themselves?

SK: It was a controversial project. People said, when you donate your body to science, that's not a blank check to do whatever you want. Some people called it horrifying. And some people said that they didn't think it had any scientific value. I understand the ethical concerns, but I don't think it's true that we didn't learn anything.

One thing that sticks out in my mind that I was surprised about is how they used authentic tools. Archaeologists have found obsidian blades with mummies — those are volcanic glass — and they found copper tools associated with them. So, when these guys were trying to open the body up initially, it turned out that the copper blades they had were not good at all. They could not get through the skin and the muscle of the abdomen very well. The obsidian tools turned out to be much better at that task, which surprised me. I wouldn't have thought that the stone tools would have been better than the metal tools. That's something we wouldn't have learned had we not gone through the process.

Also, the iconic look of the mummy: It has retracted teeth and sparse hair and a forehead pulled very tight. Bob Brier, the Egyptologist involved, had seen a lot of mummies, and he always wanted to know, do they look like that because they've been sitting in Egypt, a dry environment, for 3,000 years, or is it the mummification process that gives them that look? And he said that even after about five weeks, when they took a peek at the body, they could tell it had that classic iconic mummy look. He said it looked exactly like Ramesses the Great to him. So we did learn things about the mummification process through this that we just wouldn't have known otherwise.

KK: That's amazing that this controversial experiment produced new knowledge. You mentioned you mummified something — tell me about it.

SK: I did mummify a fish for the book. That was kind of a fun process, and it was a surprisingly easy thing to do. You can rub the oils in, wrap them up, include little spells like they did back then. But the basic process is just using natron — which is baking soda and salt — and you just put the fish or whatever you want to mummify underneath this. Then it just does the work on its own.

KK: Then I guess the real question is, did you eat that fish that you mummified?

SK: No, but it's sitting on my shelf still as a little memento. I did accumulate quite a nice collection of artifacts and things – stone tools I made, I opened and ate an ostrich egg. I made tapa or kapa — which is a type of Polynesian bark cloth. So I did get to do and make and take home a lot of cool souvenirs from this.

KK: That's so fun! And your book is a little different from some other popular science books because you include these fictional narratives based in archaeological and historical fact. In the introduction, you call them a "form of time travel." Tell me a bit more about why you chose this unusual structure for the book and what you hope readers will get out of that.

SK: What I really value about experimental archaeology is that it's pretty immersive, especially the sensory aspects of it. You do get to feel — to some degree, at least — that you are there and that you are doing the things that people back then were doing. I thought that fiction would allow me to take that even one step further and really get in the minds and be in the world that those people lived in. So you get to wake up where they did, eat the foods that they did, and experience their society. Something like religion or their beliefs in the supernatural or spiritual beliefs are not going to be amenable to experimental archaeology, but you can do that in fiction. And so it allowed me to take it one step further, and it was just fun to try and fun to write as well.

KK: Is experimental archaeology going to be something you cover more in a future book?

SK: I think I could do it if I wanted to revisit it because there were other cultures that, for various reasons, I decided to not include. People are doing work in ancient Greece, but that didn't make it into the book. I do have one chapter in sub-Saharan Africa tens of thousands of years ago, but that was the Cradle of Humankind. I could certainly do other aspects of that. There's definitely fodder out there for another book, especially as these techniques get more accepted. It has been heartening to see that people are more accepting of experimental archaeology, and even people on traditional digs now are running maybe an experiment or two. So they're not going all the way to experimental archaeology, but they're incorporating these practices.

It's just such a fun field. I really would encourage people to get involved with it and to try it out, because you can do a lot of basic things like gather acorns and try to make a recipe out of those. Or research some ancient Roman or Greek food and try to re-create that stuff ‪—‬ just little experiments and things you can do to get people excited about it and bring the past alive in a new way.

And I have a new book coming out in the fall called "The Museum of Lost Things: True Tales of Fabled Treasures, Legendary Cities, and Mythical Creatures That Vanished From History" [National Geographic, 2026]. It's about the greatest lost treasures in history and has some interesting archaeological angles in there.

KK: I'll look forward to reading that. Thanks for chatting with me!

Editor's note: This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Ancient Egypt quiz: Test your smarts about pyramids, hieroglyphs and King Tut

Early Christian communities in Sweden often buried children in the same grave with adults, but archaeologists have found that these individuals rarely shared close biological ties, raising the question of how medieval people interred their dead.

In a new study, researchers analyzed the DNA of 142 skeletons from three cemeteries in Sweden dating to the 10th to 14th centuries, focusing on collective burials in which two or more people were buried in the same tomb.

"We often assume that adults and children sharing a grave were parents and children or other close family members," study first author Maja Krzewińska, a paleogeneticist at Stockholm University, said in a statement. "In most cases, that was not what we found."

The researchers determined that most burials containing multiple individuals held both adults and children and that the people buried together were usually of the same sex — a woman buried with a girl or a man buried with a boy. But the DNA analysis held a surprise: People buried together rarely exhibited close biological kinship, the researchers wrote.

When Christianity spread across Scandinavia starting in the late 10th century, burial practices became more uniform. Graves were oriented east to west, and people were buried in a simple shroud without any grave goods. Baptized individuals were allowed to be interred in consecrated cemetery grounds, while babies who died before they could be baptized were excluded.

"We have previously analyzed a burial containing an adult and the remains of a fetus, which we believe represents an unbaptized individual," Krzewińska told Live Science in an email.

These unusual burial arrangements likely point to early Christian traditions. For instance, some of the children buried with adults in the new study may have been unbaptized. Normally ineligible for burial in the cemetery, the children may have been opportunistically interred with an adult to get around religious norms. Other burials may reflect unrelated people buried together in the spring after passing away in the winter, when burial in the frozen ground was impossible.

"We also believe, based on more distant genetic affinity, that some co-burials represent more distant family relations, or even non-biological kin group relations," Krzewińska said.

In early medieval Scandinavia, households often included extended relatives, servants, employees and enslaved individuals, the researchers wrote. While biological kinship played a large role in the organization of society, membership in the local Christian community may have been equally important in determining where and with whom to bury a deceased person.

"Archaeologists have debated the relationships between people buried together in this type of grave for a long time," study co-author Anna Kjellström, an archaeologist at Stockholm University, said in the statement. "Ancient DNA has finally given us the tool we have been waiting for to test these interpretations directly."

We are family

In addition to collective burials of unrelated people, the archaeologists discovered evidence that some families were buried within the same cemetery over several generations. One burial, known as Lady 56, was a Christian pilgrim who anchored three generations of relatives.

Lady 56 died when she was around 30 years old. She was buried with a rare scallop shell, a symbol of the apostle James, that she obtained after completing a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, a town in northwest Spain on the edge of Christian Europe.

The researchers also identified Lady 56's kin group, which was of particular importance to the community and stretched over generations in the Västerhus cemetery, Krzewińska said. The DNA analysis revealed that Lady 56's parents, brother and daughters were also buried in the same cemetery, but in different places.

Västerhus was part of a wealthy landowner's farm from the 11th to 14th centuries, and the cemetery contained the remains of more than a dozen members of a biologically related group, many of whom were interred with members of a different kin group.

The DNA connections between the main Västerhus family and other kin groups in the cemetery support the special status of the main family. These close-kin burials highlight the importance of ancient-DNA testing, as different burials from the same time and region can follow very different traditions.

What do you know about Jesus Christ, the man? Test your knowledge of biblical archaeology with our Jesus Christ quiz!

Around 100,000 years ago, an early Homo sapiens man was probably stabbed in the face with a sharp stone tool and later buried in a cave in what is now Israel, archaeologists have determined. The Stone Age cold case appears to be the earliest evidence of this kind of interpersonal violence, according to the research team.

In a study published June 30 in the journal Scientific Reports, the international team of researchers closely examined the skull and lower jaw of a person who was deliberately buried in Qafzeh cave in Israel during the Middle Paleolithic period.

At least 27 people were buried in Qafzeh cave between about 145,000 and 92,000 years ago, making them some of the earliest members of our species to be found outside Africa. Previous analysis of the skeletons, which were excavated between the 1930s and 1970s, revealed that two people had head injuries resulting from blunt trauma.

But the new analysis, which employed microscopic and micro-CT scanning techniques, revealed that Qafzeh 25, an adult male, had a cut mark across his lower left jaw that affected one of his bicuspids and part of his upper jaw. The jawbone showed signs of healing, suggesting that the man lived for a significant amount of time after being injured, the researchers wrote in the study.

Archaeologists had previously identified only a few cases of trauma caused by sharp weapons or projectiles in Middle Paleolithic skeletons. Although these injuries could have resulted from hunting accidents, the researchers wrote, they have generally been interpreted as evidence of interpersonal violence.

The cut mark on the jaw of Qafzeh 25 was found on the left side of his face, lending further support to the idea that the injury was not an accident.

It's not clear what kind of tool made the cut mark, but stone tools found at Qafzeh included flint scrapers and sharp points that could have been fashioned into spear tips.

"Forensic studies of modern human populations have reported that craniofacial injuries resulting from blows are more frequently observed on the left side of the skull, a distribution commonly attributed to the predominance of right-handed assailants in face-to-face confrontations," the researchers wrote.

If the researchers' interpretation of the cut mark is correct, it "would represent the earliest documented case of sharp force trauma in the archaeological record," they wrote.

Qafzeh cave is already well known within archaeology for its clear evidence that early humans buried their dead. The new discovery confirms that the earliest human groups left Africa with a complex culture.

"These results provide new data to the debate on the origin of complex behaviors such as interpersonal violence, the care of injured or sick individuals and funeral practices," study first author Ana Pantoja Pérez, a paleoanthropologist at Spain's National Research Center for Human Evolution, said in a statement.

See how much you know about early humans with our human evolution quiz!