Despite being at the crossroads of the well-studied worlds of ancient Egypt and Nubia, the archaeology of the Atbai Desert, the region between the Nubian Nile and the Red Sea, is still in its infancy. Cultural horizons are poorly defined, and patterns and chronologies of human habitation are only slowly emerging. As part of the satellite remote sensing workflows of the Atbai Survey Project, a common monumental burial feature has been identified across the entire Atbai Desert from Upper Egypt to the Eritrean borderlands, typified by a circular stone enclosure wall with internal burials—labelled here as “Atbai Enclosure Burials (AEBs).” This monumental feature, a local manifestation of common Saharan prehistoric burial practice, while exhibiting diverse architectural features, presents a consistent burial tradition across the entire desert expanse between the Nile and Red Sea. These features are a unique manifestation of a local pastoralist culture we broadly date to the fourth and third millennia BC, whose beginning was coeval with the southward displacement of the Inter Tropical Convergence Zone. Its termination is likely linked with harsher environmental conditions and increasing anthropogenic pressures on vegetation cover after the end of the African Humid Period.
This study presents the results of a comprehensive archaeological investigation of sixty funerary structures excavated in the Khaybar oasis as part of the Khaybar Longue Durée Archaeological Project, conducted between 2020 and 2024, in northwestern Saudi Arabia. Adopting a multidisciplinary methodology that integrates architectural analysis, stratigraphic sequencing, biological anthropology and archaeothanatological approaches, the research aims to reconstruct burial practices and generate new insights into the population interred within these monuments. Although the preservation of human skeletal remains was generally poor, the excavations identified a number of individual primary burials. Radiocarbon dating of associated materials has made it possible to establish a refined chronological framework, placing the use of these funerary structures between the late 4th and early 2nd millennia BCE. This temporal span covers a period of considerable social and cultural changes in Northwest Arabia. The analysis reveals substantial transformations in tomb architecture, mortuary gestures, and the deposition of grave goods, particularly evident during the transition from the 3rd to the 2nd millennium BCE. Patterns of reuse were observed in several monuments, suggesting sustained engagement with burial sites over extended periods of time. Notably, the marked underrepresentation of immature individuals raises important questions about age-based social selection in funerary treatment. Beyond documenting these patterns, the study contributes to broader discussions of social organization, commemorative practices, and shifting attitudes toward death and the afterlife in Bronze Age Arabia. By situating the Khaybar data within a wider regional context, it offers a valuable comparative framework for understanding mortuary traditions in arid-zone oasis societies.
Music is one of the most pleasurable stimuli in humans' life, often experienced in social contexts where shared enjoyment can amplify emotional responses. Despite its significance, the neural and affective mechanisms underlying socially shared music remain largely unexplored. Using hyperscanning fNIRS, we examined shared musical pleasure in friend dyads (N = 34) who listened to favorite and experimenter-selected music either alone or together. Joint listening did not increase pleasure in general, but slightly enhanced pleasure for friend's music and increased Pleasure Similarity, defined as the correlation of continuous pleasure ratings within dyads. Musical pleasure was associated to heightened activity in the prefrontal cortex, particularly in the joint condition. In the joint (vs solo) condition, Interpersonal Neural Synchrony (INS) was greater, and significantly predicted by Pleasure Similarity. These findings reveal the neural dynamics of shared musical pleasure, emphasizing the important role of social sharing in modulating music-induced reward processing.
Humans conceptualize time in terms of space, allowing flexible time construals from various perspectives. We can travel internally through a timeline to remember the past and imagine the future (i.e., mental time travel) or watch from an external standpoint to have a panoramic view of history (i.e., mental time watching). However, the neural mechanisms that support these flexible temporal construals remain unclear. To investigate this, we asked participants to learn a fictional religious ritual of 15 events. During fMRI scanning, they were guided to consider the event series from either an internal or external perspective in different tasks. Behavioral results confirmed the success of our manipulation, showing the expected symbolic distance effect in the internal-perspective task and the reverse effect in the external-perspective task. We found that the activation level in the posterior parietal cortex correlated positively with sequential distance in the external-perspective task but negatively in the internal-perspective task. In contrast, the activation level in the anterior hippocampus positively correlated with sequential distance regardless of the observer’s perspectives. These results suggest that the hippocampus stores the memory of the event sequences allocentrically in a perspective-agnostic manner. Conversely, the posterior parietal cortex retrieves event sequences egocentrically from the optimal perspective for the current task context. Such complementary allocentric and egocentric representations support both the stability of memory storage and the flexibility of time construals.
Maps depicting the geographic location of languages are essential tools for linguistic research. Although many language maps are available in the scientific literature, most encode spatial information as static images, often on paper. In contrast, geographic databases store languages as georeferenced digital data, allowing integration with other datasets, quantitative geographic analyses, and mapping. At present, there is no open-access platform providing digital language areas. To address this limitation, we introduce Glottography, a free and open geolinguistic data platform for mapping the world’s languages. Glottography represents the speaker areas of the world’s languages as georeferenced spatial polygons, enriched with relevant metadata, including Glottocodes that link each polygon to a unique identifier in Glottolog, a database cataloguing the world’s dialects, languages, and language families. Glottography currently includes more than 13,000 language areas of 5,300 distinct languages, digitised from 29 source publications. For each source, the platform provides the data in its raw, unmodified form and aggregated at the levels of languages and language families, according to the classification in Glottolog. Glottography is accessible through Rglottography, an R package, and is accompanied by detailed tutorials for usage and data acquisition that encourage users to contribute new geodata to the platform. Being the first open data source of its kind, Glottography enables computational analyses that explore the origins, distribution, and drivers of global linguistic diversity.
