Biological anthropology articles from across Nature Portfolio

Streptococcus pyogenes is a human pathogen responsible for a range of diseases. Here, the authors reconstruct an ancient S. pyogenes genome from a pre-Columbian Bolivian mummy, supporting that the pathogen circulated in the Americas prior to the European contact.

Here, the authors leverage stable isotope and peptide analyses to show that some 18th century Māori individuals ate largely plant-based diets. This work aligns with Māori oral history and archaeological evidence, which points to sweet potato and taro cultivation as important for population growth and cultural change at the time.

In the Uspallata Valley, agriculture was adopted by local populations, as evidenced by genetic continuity from earlier hunter-gatherers to farmers; maize-dependent groups from the same regional population later experienced stress and demographic decline and likely used social organization and migration as resilience strategies.

In this analysis of biomolecular and archaeological data from a ninth-century BCE mass grave in the Carpathian Basin, Fibiger et al. find evidence for the targeted killing of mostly unrelated women and children, challenging views of prehistoric violence.

On discovering that one of the largest prehistoric mass graves of Europe predominantly held violently killed women and children, we used a battery of methods to investigate how this gender-selective and age-selective pattern reflected the strategic disruption of power networks and lineages in the Early Iron Age.

Focusing on the Songzhuang cemetery, this study aims to enhance understanding of social diversity in Eastern Zhou society. We adopted a multidisciplinary approach to uncover the profound influence of social inequality within an Eastern Zhou community, and to identify a rare case of social class mobility.

Over a decade of data on wild orangutans were used to program an agent-based model of orangutan diet development. Adult-like diets were attainable only if simulated immature individuals learned from others, which indicates that orangutan diets are broader than what any individual could produce independently. Wild orangutan diets therefore represent culturally dependent knowledge repertoires that are produced by social learning.

Geochemical chronologies in surface increments and exposed cross-sections of naturally fractured hominin enamel from the South African sites of Swartkrans and Kromdraai indicate that Paranthropus robustus exploited both forest and grassland habitats, and that individuals did not move on the landscape in a manner analogous to extant African apes.

Archaeologist with a wide view of prehistory and a passion for innovative collaboration.