Cattle on the rocks: Understanding cattle mobility, diet, and seasonality in the Iberian Peninsula. The Middle Neolithic site of Cova de les Pixarelles (Tavertet, Osona).

Reconstructing past herd mobility, reproduction, and diet is crucial for understanding animal management practices among the first sedentary farming communities. It can also shed light on how domestic animals were integrated into the existing exchange networks of goods, products, and raw materials, and how they contributed to broader economic and social changes during the Neolithic. Despite the longstanding importance of cattle (Bos taurus) to herders, the role of cattle in the daily, seasonal, and annual cycle of activities of early farming communities remains relatively poorly understood.

Shifting Antarctic Circumpolar Current south of Africa over the past 1.9 million years.

The Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC) dominates the transfer of heat, salt, and tracers around the Southern Ocean (SO), driving the upwelling of carbon-rich deep waters around Antarctica. Paleoclimate reconstructions reveal marked variability in SO circulation; however, few records exist coupling quantitative reconstructions of ACC flow with tracers of SO upwelling spanning multiple Pleistocene glacial cycles. Here, we reconstruct near-bottom flow speed variability in the SO south of Africa, revealing systematic glacial-interglacial variations in the strength and/or proximity of ACC jets.

North Atlantic temperature control on deoxygenation in the northern tropical Pacific.

Ocean oxygen content is decreasing with global change. A major challenge for modelling future declines in oxygen concentration is our lack of knowledge of the natural variability associated with marine oxygen inventory on interannual and multidecadal timescales. Here, we present 10 annually resolved 200 year-long records of denitrification, a marker of deoxygenation, from a varved sedimentary archive in the North Pacific oxygen minimum zone covering key periods over the last glacial-interglacial cycle.

Bone of contention: Intra-element variability in remodelling of human femora based on histomorphometric and isotope analyses.

The volume of human carbon (δ13C) and nitrogen (δ15N) isotope data produced in archaeological research has increased markedly in recent years. However, knowledge of bone remodelling, its impact on isotope variation, and the temporal resolution of isotope data remains poorly understood. Varied remodelling rates mean different elements (e.

Transient fertilization of a post-Sturtian Snowball ocean margin with dissolved phosphate by clay minerals.

Marine sedimentary rocks deposited across the Neoproterozoic Cryogenian Snowball interval, ~720-635 million years ago, suggest that post-Snowball fertilization of shallow continental margin seawater with phosphorus accelerated marine primary productivity, ocean-atmosphere oxygenation, and ultimately the rise of animals. However, the mechanisms that sourced and delivered bioavailable phosphate from land to the ocean are not fully understood. Here we demonstrate a causal relationship between clay mineral production by the melting Sturtian Snowball ice sheets and a short-lived increase in seawater phosphate bioavailability by at least 20-fold and oxygenation of an immediate post-Sturtian Snowball ocean margin.