Details from the lives of three young men buried in a sixteenth-century mass grave in Mexico City have finally been brought to light by researchers who conducted isotope, genetic, and osteological analysis of their remains. Most notably, all three appear to have been born in West Africa. The men’s teeth were filed into shapes similar to those described by contemporaneous European travelers to West Africa and to dental modifications still performed by some groups in the region today. The skeletons were originally discovered in the 1980s, when subway construction revealed a colonial-era hospital for Indigenous people. “We know there were a large number of Africans who were abducted and transported to New Spain, but they did not generally live in Mexico City,” says archaeogeneticist Rodrigo Barquera of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. “That’s why it’s surprising to find these three individuals there.”

The skeletons also show evidence of strenuous physical labor and violent trauma. According to Barquera, the men were likely among the first generation of enslaved Africans brought to coastal Mexico in the 1520s. They may have toiled on a sugar plantation or in a mine before possibly becoming sick during an epidemic, which could explain their presence at the hospital. Isotope analysis of their teeth—which can determine where a person originated and what kind of food they consumed as a child—was consistent with West African ecosystems, and their DNA revealed that all three shared West African ancestry. However, the men weren’t related to each other, and the team couldn’t connect them to a specific population. It is possible, Barquera explains, that “after the community in Africa was raided, it disappeared from the historical record.”

The largest-ever study of Viking DNA has revealed a wealth of information, offering new insights into the Vikings’ genetic diversity and travel habits. The ambitious research analyzed DNA taken from 442 skeletons discovered at more than 80 Viking sites across northern Europe and Greenland. The genomes were then compared with a genetic database of thousands of present-day individuals to try to ascertain who the Vikings really were and where they ventured. One of the project’s primary objectives was to better understand the Viking diaspora, says University of California, Berkeley, geneticist Rasmus Nielsen.

It turns out that the roving bands of raiders and traders, traditionally thought to have come only from Norway, Denmark, and Sweden, were far more genetically diverse than expected. According to Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagen, one of the most unexpected results was that the Viking Age of exploration may have actually been driven by outsiders. The researchers found that just prior to the Viking Age and during its height, between A.D. 800 and 1050, genes flowed into Scandinavia from people arriving there from eastern and southern Europe, and even from western Asia. In contrast to the traditional image of the light-haired, light-eyed Viking, the genetic evidence shows that dark hair and eyes were far more common among Scandinavians of the Viking Age than they are today. “Vikings were not restricted to genetically pure Scandinavians,” says Willerslev, “but were a diverse group of peoples with diverse ancestry.” In fact, some who adopted the trappings of Viking identity were not Scandinavian at all. For example, two individuals who were buried in Scotland’s Orkney Islands with Viking grave goods and in traditional Viking style were, surprisingly, determined to be genetically linked to the Picts of Scotland and contemporaneous inhabitants of Ireland.

Viking raiding parties departing from a given country, the study found, tended to journey consistently to a particular destination. Expeditions from Sweden usually went eastward to the Baltic states, Poland, and Ukraine; Vikings from Norway tended to sail to Iceland, Greenland, and Ireland; and those from Denmark predominantly ventured to England. The study also determined that Viking expeditions sometimes comprised a group of close-knit, even related, individuals. Analysis of 41 skeletons from two ship burials in Salme, Estonia, indicates that they likely hailed from a small village in Sweden, and that four were brothers, entombed alongside one another. (To read a full-length article about Salme, go to “The First Vikings.”)

While conducting a surface survey of the ancient mound site of Türkmen-Karahöyük in southern Turkey, a team led by archaeologists James Osborne and Michele Massa of the University of Chicago made a surprising discovery in a canal not far from the mound: a stone stela bearing hieroglyphs in Luwian, a relative of the Hittite language. Based on the shapes of the glyphs, the inscription has been dated to the eighth century B.C. It records the military achievements of “Great King Hartapu,” a ruler previously known only from inscriptions found at two nearby hilltop sanctuaries. Those enigmatic monuments offer no details about the dates of his reign or the extent of his realm. The new inscription, Osborne explains, establishes Hartapu as a Neo-Hittite leader who claims to have conquered the wealthy kingdom of Phrygia in west-central Anatolia and, in a single year, to have defeated a coalition of 13 kings. “We now know almost certainly that Hartapu’s capital city was Türkmen-Karahöyük and that he was allegedly powerful enough to defeat Phrygia in battle when it was at its height,” Osborne says. “Hartapu wasn’t a local yokel, he was apparently a major Iron Age player.”

Based on the ceramics they recovered from the mound, the researchers have determined that, by around 1400 B.C., Türkmen-Karahöyük had grown from a small settlement to a regional center sprawling over more than 300 acres. During the succeeding centuries and throughout Hartapu’s reign, Osborne says, the city probably continued to be one of the largest in Anatolia. “Even in a country as archaeologically diverse as Turkey,” he says, “it’s not every day that an archaeologist finds a massive Bronze and Iron Age city that has never been touched.”