Humans, Volume 6, Issue 2 (June 2026) – 9 articles

Unprovenanced skeletal remains housed in anatomy laboratories, medical schools, and museums present a persistent ethical challenge when the human skeletal remains potentially represent historically marginalized or legally protected populations. Reliance on a single line of evidence, like epitaphonomic indicators or population affinity estimates, may result in incomplete or misleading assessments. Herein, we present a structured, non-destructive protocol integrating epitaphonomic signatures and an estimation of population affinity (including assessing biocultural indicators of affinity) to support ethical decision-making regarding unprovenanced crania in institutional collections. Our proposed protocol was applied to 16 unprovenanced crania curated in a university anatomy collection. Epitaphonomic signatures associated with anatomical preparation were assessed using categorical scores; craniometric data were analyzed using FORDISC 3.1 following the standard approach therein and using a custom reference dataset imported into the program. Additional exploratory analyses were conducted using a Factor Analysis of Mixed Data (FAMD) to visualize concordance and discordance between epitaphonomic and craniometric variables. Results indicate most individuals exhibit epitaphonomic signatures consistent with anatomical preparation; however, when those data are integrated with craniometric analysis, we identified individuals warranting removal from teaching collections based on elevated ethical concerns. Case examples demonstrate how our protocol supports transparent ethical triage distinguishing between likely anatomically prepared human remains, human remains requiring repatriation, and indeterminate cases requiring further evaluation. This protocol provides a practical, nondestructive framework for the responsible stewardship of unprovenanced skeletal collections. Full article

Large-scale landscape transformation in mountainous regions during the Late Iron Age remains insufficiently integrated into broader debates on European urbanism. In southwestern Transylvania, extensive slope terracing came to define the spatial core of the Dacian political centre. This study examines the scale, organization, and social implications of this engineered landscape using high-resolution LiDAR data and spatial modelling. Over 4000 anthropogenic terraces were identified, and their spatial patterning was analysed through Kernel Density Estimation (300 m and 800 m radii) in order to evaluate intensity gradients and territorial articulation. The results indicate compact nuclei of high terrace concentration embedded within a broader, yet continuous, system structured along ridge corridors and circulation routes. The spatial correlation between terrace density and elevated architectural features suggests differentiated building practices and hierarchical organization within a territorially extensive settlement pattern. Rather than representing isolated fortified sites, the Dacian mountain core emerges as an integrated and infrastructurally connected landscape. These findings support the interpretation of the area as a form of Late Iron Age low-density urbanism, in which habitation, mobility, and social differentiation were materially embedded in large-scale topographic modification. Full article

Water-related ritual practices constitute a central axis through which many Andean communities articulate cosmology, social organization, and collective identity. This study examines the Fiesta del Agua (Layimama), an ancestral ritual cycle celebrated in the inter-Andean valley of Ticsani (Moquegua, southern Peru), focusing on its symbolic structure, social roles, and implications for water governance and cultural continuity. Using a qualitative, interpretive research design based on documentary analysis of ethnographic, historical, and anthropological sources, the study analyzes how ritual practices surrounding water function as mechanisms of social cohesion, moral regulation, and symbolic management of a shared natural resource. The findings show that the Fiesta del Agua operates as a cyclical system composed of four interrelated stages (preparation, ritual performance, festive redistribution, and communal closure) through which water is sacralized as an axis mundi linking cosmology, agricultural production, and social prestige. Far from being a residual tradition, the festival actively reproduces collective identity, regulates communal access to water, and integrates Andean cosmology with Catholic symbolism through dynamic forms of religious syncretism. The article argues that the ritual management of water in Ticsani represents a culturally embedded governance system whose documentation and protection are essential in contexts of increasing hydrosocial stress and cultural erosion, indicating social, ecological, and political relevance of the findings and contributing to broader debates on human–environment relations, intangible cultural heritage, and the role of ritual in sustaining communal resource management. Full article

Prime numbers are central to mathematics, yet popular discourse often treats particular primes as if they carried intrinsic messages, personalities, or moral charge. This study asks how that shift from legitimate curiosity to superstition-adjacent pattern making occurs and why it feels persuasive. Using qualitative content analysis of three widely circulated media examples, this paper maps how culturally specific number meanings are produced and transmitted, and how predictable cognitive biases support their plausibility. The analysis pairs anthropological mechanisms of symbolic association, prestige borrowing, community boundary marking, and meme-based diffusion with psychological mechanisms that include Type I error, apophenia, confirmation bias, availability, narrative fallacy, selection effects, survivorship, cultural priming, and authority or celebrity cueing. Across the cases, the results show a recurrent coupling: cultural schemas supply ready-made interpretive templates, while cognitive biases turn salience and coincidence into perceived significance, concentrating attention on narratively convenient primes and obscuring the many alternative patterns that could have been selected. This paper concludes that meanings such as 666 as evil are culture dependent rather than mathematical properties, and that improving public communication about primes requires making selection processes and interpretive frames explicit while preserving legitimate mathematical wonder. Full article

Secular changes in the physical growth of children in the 20th century have been examined largely between cohorts of boys or men, with fewer studies examining changes among girls/women or both sexes. Sex-specific growth trajectories and differential cultural treatment of the sexes can affect how girls and boys respond to changes in the ontogenetic environment. This study examined secular change in height (cm) and weight (kg) in affluent Portuguese school children from three periods over the 20th century: an early (1913–1916), middle (1929–1943), and late (1992–2012) period. Anthropometric data was taken from medical records and archives of two boarding schools located in or near Lisbon: the Colégio Militar for boys and the Instituto de Odivelas for girls. Height and weight data were collated from over 1349 children (over 825 boys and 524 girls), aged to 10 to 17 years. Height and weight were plotted against age for the three periods to assess secular changes and sex differences in the secular trend. Results indicate a similar pattern of secular change across boys and girls, wherein children measured in the late period demonstrated an increase in height and weight, with the greatest increase occurring between the middle and late periods. The increase in height and weight can be attributed to changes to the socioeconomic environment in Portugal after the 1960s, but particularly after the democratic transition of 1974. This includes population-wide improvements in living standards, sanitation, decreased disease load, access to medical care and improved quantity and quality of nutrition. Cultural-based preferential treatment of boys may have taken place, as boys increased more in relative and absolute height and weight. Full article

School-collected data on height, weight, and body mass index (BMI) offers tremendous potential for examining differences in the growth and development of students in varying environments. This study examines data on height, weight, and BMI of 1858 students, in kindergarten through eighth grade, from two school districts in central New Jersey that are geographically close, but that are distinct in composition regarding their self-identified primary ethnicity and socioeconomic environments. In one district, 78.6% of the students identify as Hispanic or Latino, and in the second district, 88.9% of the students identify as White. Mann–Whitney U tests and a Kruskal–Wallis test were run on height, weight, and BMI, comparing median values of the students from the two districts by grade and ethnicity, respectively. These results, combined with results from a Dunn post hoc pairwise test, indicate that the significant differences could be attributed to socioeconomic status or self-identified primary ethnicity. Upon further testing, however, comparing students of different self-identified primary ethnicities within districts and comparing students within the same self-identified primary ethnicity across districts reveals a stronger association with socioeconomic status. Overall, the students in the less affluent population were shorter and heavier than the students in the more affluent population. Full article

This article examines how bordering is experienced in alpine environments undergoing rapid ecological change. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2024 and 2025 in the transboundary region of the Aosta Valley (Italy), Haute-Savoie (France), and the Canton of Valais (Switzerland), it explores how more-than-human relations become strained, suspended, or reconfigured through infrastructural instability, environmental rupture, and sanitary regulation. Based on a photo-ethnography, the analysis focuses on three empirical cases: infrastructural disruptions in the Val de Bagnes; the collapse of the Birch Glacier in the Lötschental Valley; and the effects of the Lumpy Skin Disease on pastoral practices across transboundary valleys. The article shows that alpine spaces are continuously co-produced by more-than-human assemblages through dynamics, in which bordering emerges not as fixed spatial line but as a conditional relational process unfolding across elevations and over time. By foregrounding interruption, waiting, constrained access, regulated proximity, suspension and exposure, it contributes to posthuman border studies by approaching bordering as a relational dynamic grounded in the material and temporal conditions under which more-than-human relations become practicable or impracticable. Full article

Perhaps one of the most defining ‘techniques of the body’ for human beings is bi-pedal walking. This study brings together studies in socio-cultural anthropology to reflect on the nature of walking as a field method in different social-environmental contexts. The study offers an account of walking in relation to natural history, urban studies and contemporary conservation science. How has walking served as a field method in different knowledge-making contexts, and how does it afford an experiential way of being and belonging (or not) in urban and rural settings? By reflecting on such themes, this paper sheds light on the many ways that people walk, and the places, physical and metaphorical, that it takes them and allows them to discover, reveal, and understand. Full article

Humans, and most other late Homo species, are characterized by large brains and bodies. However, the discovery of two small-brained Homo species—H. floresiensis and Homo naledi—has cast doubts on large brain size as a defining feature of our genus. We reevaluated brain and body size scaling using data for 225 extant primates and 16 fossil hominid taxa, including one of the most diminutive species in genus Homo, H. floresiensis. Brain and body size are tightly correlated in genus Homo, varying along a positively allometric slope (R² = 0.84, F(1,5) = 33, p < 0.01) that is significantly different from the slope characterizing extant primates (R² = 0.94, F(1,222) = 3294, p < 0.001). Both small-bodied Homo floresiensis and Homo naledi have endocranial volumes (ECVs) that are consistent with their body size given the scaling relationship that characterizes genus Homo. Paired ECV and body mass estimates demonstrate considerable overlap of brain:body size proportions across fossil hominid taxa. Earlier hominids, Ardipithecus ramidus and Australopithecus anamensis, are characterized by ancestral brain:body size scaling; we discuss the hypothesis that a fundamental biological shift ca. 3 Ma altered the trajectory of encephalization—potentially linked to changes in fetal growth and gestation in Pleistocene fossil hominids—and may be directly implicated in the evolution of complex symbolic behavior in our lineage. Full article