Exploring African DNA can transform understanding of human genetics – what does that mean for medicine?

Why African genomics holds the key to precision medicine and global health equity

Taylor & Francis Group

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Africa is home to more human genetic diversity than anywhere else on Earth. The average African genome shows nearly a million more genetic variants than the average non-African genome.

But this wealth of data remains largely unexplored, with African populations historically underrepresented in research. Less than 3% of global genomic datasets and genome-wide association studies include participants of African descent.

Renowned African researchers have released a new book to explain what we know about the continent’s remarkable genetic diversity, showcase on-the-ground research being carried out today and set out a roadmap for future discoveries.

Genomics in Africa is designed to support the next generation of African scientists, providing vital information for researchers, funders and policymakers working to advance genomics and precision medicine in the continent.

It is co-edited by Professor Segun Fatumo of Queen Mary University of London, and Dr Tinashe Chikowore of Harvard Medical School, who believe there is an urgent need to invest in African genomics research.

Professor Fatumo says: “Genetic research on the African continent could create more effective precision medicine, improve global drug development, and help scientists understand everything from our evolutionary history to why some people develop particular diseases.”

Why is Africa so genetically diverse?

While there is a lot we don’t know about human evolution and background, it is accepted that early Homo sapiens evolved in Africa approximately 300,000 years ago. Over millennia, we spread across the continent and settled all over it.

At some point between 50,000 and 70,000 years ago, a small band of people left Africa. This might have been a single tribe or group of tribes, and it likely had only a few thousand people of childbearing age.

There have been other migrations, but this particular one – known as the Southern Route or Southern Dispersal – is believed to be the founder population which colonised the rest of the world and interbred with archaic humans such as Neanderthals and Denisovans.

The small size of this founder population means all modern humans with ancestry outside Africa share a high degree of genetic similarity.

While we can’t know exactly how many people in total were living on the African continent at that time, we do know that the population the group left was much larger and much more genetically diverse. This means many gene variants not present in the handful of people who left Africa have been passed down and are thriving in people of African genetic heritage.

What would more research tell us?

Ambroise Wonkam, Professor of Medical Genetics at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and current President of the African Society of Human Genetics said of the work: “Increasing the number of sequenced African genomes will refine tools for predicting disease-related variants, improve diagnoses, and enhance precision medicine.

“Ultimately, investing in African genomics promotes both scientific innovation and health equity worldwide.”

Professor Segun Fatumo and Dr Tinashe Chikowore suggest that further research into African genomics could also develop and improve treatments of inherited diseases which predominantly affect African populations, such as sickle cell disease.

African researchers are currently exploring research into infectious diseases, cardiometabolic traits, cancer, mental health traits and medicine sensitivities – but the authors argue more investment both in research and infrastructure is needed to unlock the potential of these studies.

They propose a ten-year strategic roadmap for research leaders, funders, and governments planning future genomic initiatives on the continent.

“Research into these areas is essential to ensure that people with African genetic heritage can experience the full benefit of precision medicine and gene therapies,” Professor Fatumo explains. “Genetic variation could mean they react differently to treatments or medicines developed for the population outside Africa, so for true health equity there is an urgent case to expand on current scientific knowledge.”

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DOI

10.1201/9781003436584 

Ancient DNA identifies 146,000 year-old 'Dragon Man' as a Denisovan

Joseph Shavit
Updated Sun, October 11, 2026



Ancient DNA from tooth plaque and proteins from skull bone identify China's Dragon Man as Denisovan, revealing detailed anatomy. (CREDIT: The Brighter Side of News)

Ancient DNA and proteins identify China's nearly complete "Dragon Man" skull as Denisovan.

The fossil, at least 146,000 years old, connects molecular evidence with detailed Denisovan skull anatomy.

DNA came from hardened tooth plaque and proteins from skull bone; the lineage's formal species name remains unresolved.

A trace of hardened plaque on a single surviving molar helped solve the identity of one of Asia's most puzzling human fossils. The nearly complete Harbin skull, nicknamed "Dragon Man," belonged to a Denisovan, an extinct human lineage closely related to Neanderthals.

Two molecular studies published in 2025 supplied complementary evidence. A team led by Qiaomei Fu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology recovered mitochondrial DNA from dental calculus. A separate analysis recovered ancient proteins from skull bone.

The findings appeared in Cell00627-0) and Science. Together, they connect a richly preserved skull with a lineage previously represented mainly by fragmentary remains.

"This is a pin in the map we can use to say, 'This is what Denisovans looked like,'" said Carina Schlebusch, an evolutionary anthropologist at Uppsala University who was not involved in either study.

An ancient skull discovered near Harbin, China, reveals evidence of an extinct human lineage. (CREDIT: Hebei GEO University)

A recognizable skull with an uncertain identity

The Harbin cranium comes from Heilongjiang Province in northeastern China. Direct uranium-series dating established a minimum age of approximately 146,000 years, rather than an exact date for the individual's life.

Its preservation makes it especially valuable. The skull is nearly complete and undistorted, retaining features that small teeth or bone fragments cannot reveal together.

When researchers described it in 2021, its large size, thick brow ridges and heavy upper jaw attracted attention. Hebei GEO University researcher Ji Qiang and colleagues proposed a new species, Homo longi, with the name referring to "dragon."

Other researchers suspected a Denisovan connection because of the fossil's location, age and anatomy. However, comparisons of shape produced conflicting interpretations of its relationship to other ancient humans.

Some analyses grouped Harbin with the Denisovan-associated Xiahe jaw from the Tibetan Plateau. Others separated them, illustrating the difficulty of assigning fossils to populations using anatomy alone.

Denisovans were first recognized as a distinct lineage through genetic evidence in 2010. Connecting their molecular identity with informative skull anatomy remained a major gap in reconstructing human evolution across Asia.

Researchers recovered ancient DNA from dental plaque on a skeleton's only surviving molar. (CREDIT: Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Chinese Academy of Sciences)

Hardened plaque succeeds where bone DNA fails

Fu's team initially searched for ancient DNA in samples from the skull's petrous bone and tooth material. Those attempts did not recover usable ancient human DNA

The researchers then turned to dental calculus, the mineralized plaque attached to the remaining molar. Its hardened structure can preserve biological material long after other sources become unusable.

A sample weighing just 0.3 milligrams yielded ancient mitochondrial DNA. That genetic material comes from the cell's energy-producing mitochondria and provides evidence about maternal ancestry.

Modern contamination complicated the analysis. Nearly four-fifths of the human genetic material extracted from the sample came from modern sources, making careful identification of the ancient component essential.

The surviving ancient sequences matched Denisovan mitochondrial DNA. Comparisons also linked Harbin to an early Denisovan lineage represented by individuals from Siberia. This was not a complete nuclear genome, which would offer a broader account of the individual's ancestry. The independent protein evidence therefore adds an important second line of support.

"We can finally clearly show it's Denisovan DNA, and it's related to early Denisovans," Fu said.

The result demonstrates why researchers sometimes need to examine unexpected parts of a fossil. It also shows that unsuccessful DNA recovery from dense bone does not necessarily exhaust a specimen's molecular evidence.

The Harbin cranium and geographic location of hominin specimens older than 100 ka where human DNA has been retrieved. (CREDIT: Qiaomei Fu et al, Cell)
Skull proteins provide an independent check

The protein study followed a different route, using two samples from the petrous bone. This distinction matters: its evidence did not come from the same plaque sample that yielded mitochondrial DNA.

The researchers identified 95 ancient proteins after separating likely contaminants from material belonging to the fossil. Chemical changes associated with degradation helped authenticate the ancient proteins.

Their analysis recovered 19,299 peptides, the smaller protein fragments used to reconstruct sequences. That provided substantially more protein information than earlier studies of several other ancient human specimens.

Because DNA directs protein production, differences in protein sequences can reveal inherited variation. Researchers compared Harbin's sequences with those associated with Denisovans, Neanderthals, modern humans and other apes.

One Denisovan-associated amino acid variant was supported with high confidence. Two additional variants offered potential support, although the paper treated those identifications as less reliable.

A broader analysis of protein sequences also placed Harbin with Denisovans. The grouping received 98% or 100% statistical support, depending on the comparison dataset, reinforcing the conclusion from mitochondrial DNA.

"Taking the two studies together, it's pretty clear this is a Denisovan individual," said Bence Viola, a University of Toronto paleoanthropologist who was not involved in either study.

Geographic locations and proteomic profiles for the Pleistocene hominin individuals with palaeoproteomic data. (CREDIT: Qiaomei Fu et al, Science)

A better reference for Asia's ancient humans

Harbin gives researchers an anatomical reference anchored by molecular identification. Its skull and tooth features can now guide comparisons with fossils from excavations and museum collections.

That could help assess specimens whose identities remain uncertain. However, resemblance to Harbin would be a reason for further investigation, rather than automatic proof of Denisovan ancestry.

Earlier molecular work had already connected fossils from Siberia, the Tibetan Plateau and Taiwan with Denisovans. The Harbin findings add northeastern China to that evidence and strengthen the picture of a geographically widespread lineage.

The protein paper points to Denisovan populations occupying varied environments, including low-lying plains, high plateaus and subtropical woodlands. Establishing relationships among those populations will require additional molecular sampling.

A 2019 study attempted to reconstruct Denisovan anatomy from DNA methylation patterns, proposing features including a long face and wider pelvis. Such predictions addressed a sparse fossil record, but Harbin now offers direct cranial anatomy for comparison.

The skull does not reveal the complete Denisovan body or every population's appearance. It does provide a much fuller view of one individual than the fragments that previously dominated molecularly identified remains.

Proteomic profile of the Harbin cranium. Composition across the 95 proteins retrieved for the Harbin individual. "Plasma proteins" here refers to nonmatrisome plasma proteins. (CREDIT: Qiaomei Fu et al, Science)

The lineage is clearer than the species name

Identifying Harbin as Denisovan does not settle every taxonomic question. Researchers still debate how to classify Denisovans and Neanderthals, including whether to recognize separate species or categories within Homo sapiens.

Genetic evidence shows that Denisovans interbred with modern humans. That history complicates simple divisions, while leaving their identification as a distinct ancient lineage well supported.

The name Homo longi also depends on which other fossils ultimately prove to be Denisovan. If an older applicable species name already exists, taxonomic priority could affect the name used for the group.

"Until we know which specimens are Denisovans, we can't be sure which name is valid," Viola said. Harbin's molecular identity is now much clearer, while its formal classification remains open.

Dig deeper into Denisovan fossils and ancient molecules

These studies explore how genomes, proteins and anatomical predictions have expanded the evidence for Denisovans across Asia.

A High-Coverage Genome Sequence from an Archaic Denisovan Individual: This foundational genome study established a detailed genetic reference for Denisovans and investigated their contributions to living populations. (Science, 2012)

A late Middle Pleistocene Denisovan mandible from the Tibetan Plateau: Ancient proteins identified the Xiahe jaw, connecting Denisovans with a fossil outside Siberia. (Nature, 2019)

Middle and Late Pleistocene Denisovan subsistence at Baishiya Karst Cave: Archaeological and protein analyses investigate Denisovan occupation and animal use on the Tibetan Plateau. (Nature, 2024)

A male Denisovan mandible from Pleistocene Taiwan: Protein evidence identifies the Penghu jaw as Denisovan, extending the lineage's confirmed fossil distribution. (Science, 2025)

Reconstructing Denisovan Anatomy Using DNA Methylation Maps: This study explores an indirect method for predicting Denisovan anatomical traits from reconstructed gene-regulation patterns. (Cell, 2019)

Research findings are available online in the journals Cell00627-0) and [Science]

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adu9677

Denisovan radius discovered for first time in Southwest China

Chinese Academy of Sciences Headquarters

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The geographical location of the Bianfu Cave and the morphology of the two human teeth and three newly discovered Denisovan bones.

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Credit: Image by IVPP

Scientists recently discovered various Denisovan remains in Southwest China dating back to the late Middle Pleistocene, including the first Denisovan radius—one of two long bones in the forearm.

Denisovans are a genetically identified archaic hominin group believed to have been widely distributed across Asia. However, due to the limited number of fossil remains, especially postcranial bones—those below the skull—a distribution gap has long existed in Southwest China. Therefore, little is known about the physical traits that allowed Denisovans to adapt to different environments.

In a new study, researchers employed a novel proteomic strategy to identify additional hominin bones from a Paleolithic site called Bianfu Cave in Southwest China’s Yunnan Province. Paleoproteomic analysis confirmed five hominin remains as Denisovans, helping fill the distribution gap of Denisovans in Southwest China.

According to the researchers, the discovery of the first Denisovan radius provides crucial insights into Denisovan postcranial phenotype.

The study, published in Nature on September 9, was conducted by a research team led by Professor FU Qiaomei from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), in collaboration with multiple institutions.

New Strategy

ZooMS (Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry) has recently become an important tool for large-scale screening of hominin fossils due to its advantages of micro-invasive sampling, methodological simplicity, rapid identification, and low cost. However, the recovery rate of hominin fossils has been extremely low—only 0.1% at sites such as Denisova Cave and Baishiya Karst Cave. Given that Bianfu Cave yielded more than 60,000 bone fragments, conducting ZooMS analysis on all specimens would be both costly and inefficient.

To overcome this challenge, the researchers developed a novel “morphological pre-screening + ZooMS identification” strategy. This combined approach significantly improved screening efficiency and provided a replicable methodological framework for discovering hominin remains at similar Paleolithic sites with abundant bone fragments.

Through morphological pre-screening, the researchers selected 22 potential hominin remains from the large assemblage of bone fragments. Subsequent ZooMS analysis confirmed that two parietal bone fragments (BFD767 and BFD769) and one proximal radial fragment (BFD771) were derived from hominins.

Among the three newly identified hominin specimens, BFD767 and BFD771 originated from Layer 7, which also contained four hominin teeth. This layer was dated to approximately 148,000–134,000 years ago. BFD769 came from the older Layer 9, dated to approximately 167,000–150,000 years ago.

In addition to the three hominin bones, the research team also analyzed two hominin teeth excavated from Layer 7, including a lower fourth premolar (YHB3518) and a lower second molar (YHB3075).

To obtain comprehensive proteomic profiles of the five specimens, the team extracted and analyzed proteins from multiple fractions of different tissues, including bone, dentine, and enamel. Six to 16 endogenous proteins were identified from each specimen, covering 1,972 to 4,076 amino acid residues. Notably, abundant specific peptides from the amelogenin Y isoform were identified in the enamel of the two teeth, indicating that both teeth belonged to male individuals.

Population Assignment

To determine the population assignment of these hominin specimens, the research team systematically screened for single amino acid polymorphisms (SAPs) within the endogenous proteomes.

They found that all five samples carried the Denisovan-specific variant COL1A2 R996K, indicating their Denisovan identity. Three additional informative SAPs were identified in the enamel of two Bianfu Cave teeth: the Denisovan-related variant AMBN M273V; AMELY 179L, a variant shared by modern humans, Neanderthals, and Denisovans; and AMBN 253A, a variant that distinguishes the Bianfu Cave individuals from Middle Pleistocene Homo erectus in East Asia.

Using the consensus sequences of endogenous proteins from each sample, the researchers constructed Bayesian phylogenetic trees with topologies highly consistent with those obtained from nuclear genome studies. The trees placed modern humans as the sister group to the Neanderthal-Denisovan clade. Each Bianfu Cave sample formed a monophyletic clade with Denisova 3, with a posterior probability of 100 percent. This result aligns with the SAP assignments, supporting the reliable attribution of these specimens as Denisovans.

Morphological Phenotype

Comprehensive morphological analysis was conducted on the two Denisovan parietal bones (BFD767 and BFD769) and one partial radius (BFD771). The cranial vault thickness pattern of Bianfu Cave hominins is most similar to that of H. heidelbergensis and East Asian late Middle Pleistocene archaic Homo.

Notably, BFD771 is the only confirmed Denisovan radius to date. Although it has large proximal dimensions and a likely medially oriented radial tuberosity, similar to Neanderthal radii, its overall external shape and mid-neck cross-sectional geometry align more closely with modern humans. According to the researchers, the first identified Denisovan radius fragment is of exceptional importance. Its mosaic features indicate unique biomechanical demands and behavioral adaptations in Denisovans, differing from those inferred for Neanderthals and modern humans.

Based on their results, Bianfu Cave has the richest Denisovan fossil record currently known outside Denisova Cave. The study fills a critical geographical gap in the known distribution of Denisovans. The Denisovan remains were derived from two different stratigraphic layers dating to Marine Isotope Stage 6. During this glacial period, the relatively warmer climate and abundant food resources may have enabled the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau to serve as a favorable habitat for hominins and supported the long-term survival of the Bianfu Cave population.

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Journal

Nature

DOI

10.1038/s41586-026-10976-9 

Article Title

Ancient proteins identify various Denisovan remains from Southwest China

Article Publication Date

9-Sep-2026

 

Mysterious DNA: two unknown ancestors found in human genome

Copyright AP Photo

By Nela Heidner

Published on 01/08/2026 - EURONEWS

The human family tree is gaining new branches. Researchers have found in modern humans' DNA signs of two previously unknown ancestors – extinct human forms with no fossils or decoded DNA, yet they have left traces in our genome.

Researchers at the prestigious University of California, Berkeley, have made a spectacular discovery: they identified stretches of DNA in the genomes of modern humans (source in German) that come from previously unknown ancestors. The scientists talk about so-called "ghost ancestors," because nothing is yet known about these extinct human groups.

Homo sapiens is today the only human species still alive. In the distant past, however, it shared the Earth with numerous other hominins.

Earlier studies had already shown that modern humans interbred with Neanderthals and the so-called Denisovans and had joint offspring. Many people still carry the genetic traces of these encounters in their DNA today. A new study now suggests that there were at least two further, previously unknown human groups that also passed on DNA to our ancestors.

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• Archaeologists uncover centuries of history beneath Paris Notre-Dame square

One of these previously unknown ancestors interbred in Africa with the forebears of modern humans more than 50,000 years ago. This happened before the last major migration wave of Homo sapiens to Europe and Asia. The genes inherited at that time now account for around 1% of the DNA of all humans, roughly as much as the share of Neanderthal DNA.

According to the researchers' calculations, this mysterious human lineage had split from the evolutionary line leading to modern humans around 800,000 years ago, roughly at the time when Neanderthals and Denisovans also diverged from one another.

"Earlier studies had already hypothesised that there is a so-called ghost lineage, meaning genetic traces of unknown extinct human lineages in the genomes of modern humans," explains Berkeley doctoral student Yulin Zhang, one of the study's lead authors. "However, it was previously unclear whether this unknown lineage occurs only in Africans and when this admixture happened. We have now been able to identify and map the relevant DNA segments in the genomes of modern humans and show that this ghost lineage is found in all people living today, not just in Africans."

Timeline: 1.8 million years

Even more enigmatic is the second ancestor, which the researchers describe as a "super-archaic ancestor". This human lineage had already branched off from other hominins around 1.8 million years ago. More than 200,000 years ago, it probably interbred in Eurasia with the Denisovans, and via this detour fragments of the ancient DNA finally found their way into the genome of modern humans.

"The evidence for this super-archaic ancestor is particularly exciting because it reveals genetic contributions from a human lineage that lived more than a million years ago, even though no DNA from this population has yet been decoded," says Arjun Biddanda, a postdoctoral researcher at Johns Hopkins University and co-lead author of the study.

"Thanks to ancient DNA from Neanderthals and Denisovans and new genealogical methods, we are increasingly realising that human populations have repeatedly mixed with one another in the course of evolution," says Priya Moorjani, professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley. "Human evolution therefore resembles less a branching family tree and more a complex network in which different populations were linked by repeated migrations and admixture."

Difference between Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA

Most people outside Africa today carry about 1 to 2% Neanderthal DNA in their genomes. More precisely, on average around 1 to 2% of the genome of present-day Europeans and Asians comes from Neanderthals. This is the result of interbreeding between Neanderthals and early modern humans around 50,000 to 60,000 years ago, shortly after Homo sapiens left Africa.

The inherited DNA segments still influence humans today. Some variants are associated with the immune system, skin and hair traits or adaptation to environmental conditions. Others increase the risk of certain diseases or affect the response to infections.

Population groups in Asia and Oceania also carry, in addition to Neanderthal DNA, genetic contributions from Denisovans. Corresponding remains of Denisovans have mainly been sequenced from the Eurasian region:

The genome of the oldest human fossil yet discovered in Mongolia provided new insights into early human history around six years ago. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig and the Mongolian Academy of Sciences showed that around 25% of the DNA in the approximately 34,000-year-old remains of a woman came from West Eurasian ancestors. The team also found in the woman's genome, as in that of a roughly 40,000-year-old individual from China, DNA traces of Denisovans, the extinct human form that lived in Asia before modern humans arrived there.

It is also interesting that Neanderthals and Denisovans interbred with each other as well. From a fossil from Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains in southern Siberia, near the borders with Kazakhstan, Mongolia and China, it is known that it belonged to a woman with a Neanderthal mother and a Denisovan father, direct evidence that the two human forms had joint offspring.

The skullcap found in the Salkhit Valley in eastern Mongolia comes from a woman who lived around 34,000 years ago. Institut für Archäologie, Mongolische Akademie der Wissenschaften

Exactly who these "ghost ancestors" and the "super-archaic ancestor" were is still unclear. However, the calculated dates of their divergence fit known human forms. The ghost ancestors could have belonged to Homo groups of the Middle Pleistocene that lived in Africa around 800,000 years ago. The super-archaic ancestor, by contrast, could be identical with or closely related to Homo erectus, which populated Eurasia as early as about 1.8 million years ago.

Human Origins Destroys Core Fascist Mythology – OpEd

June 19, 2026 
By Yann Perreau


How deep history challenges fascist myths of purity, hierarchy, and identity.

The deeper we explore humanity’s past, the harder it becomes to sustain some of the most powerful political myths of the modern world.

For more than a century, authoritarian ideologies have sought legitimacy in origin stories: pure people, ancestral homelands, primordial hierarchies, and civilizational destinies. Fascism, in particular, has always been obsessed with beginnings. Whether in Nazi fantasies of Aryan ancestry, myths of ethnic continuity, or contemporary narratives of demographic replacement and civilizational decline, the past is transformed into a source of authority. History becomes destiny. Origins become a source of legitimacy.

Yet archaeology, anthropology, genetics, and evolutionary science increasingly tell a different story. Research across these fields has challenged older assumptions about purity, hierarchy, and human nature. Deep history reveals migration rather than isolation, cooperation rather than perpetual conflict, and experimentation rather than inevitability.

Few 20th-century thinkers saw this more clearly than Georges Bataille, who observed that competing visions of the past often conceal varying perspectives of humanity.

Better known today for his writings on eroticism, sacrifice, and transgression, French philosopher Bataille was also one of the first major European intellectuals to recognize that prehistory could serve as an antidote to fascist mythology. During the 1930s and 1940s, when fascist movements were mobilizing myths of origin on an unprecedented scale, he turned to cave art, ritual, and the earliest traces of human life, immersing himself in the latest archaeological, anthropological, paleontological, and sociological research.

His writings on prehistory drew extensively on the discoveries and debates of his time, delving into philosophical, anthropological, and political interests at once. What distinguishes humans from other animals? How did symbolic thought emerge? What forms of community existed before states, nations, and organized religions? These questions acquired a particular urgency during the rise of Benito Mussolini in Italy and Adolf Hitler in Germany, when competing visions of humanity became a matter of life and death.

Studying cave art and the discoveries emerging from sites such as the Lascaux Cave in France, Bataille became fascinated by a simple fact. The artists who painted the walls left no names. They founded no dynasties. They erected no monuments to rulers or conquerors. But they created some of the most extraordinary images in human history.

For Bataille, the lack of names was not a footnote; it was the point.

The caves revealed forms of collective creation that preceded authorship, ownership, and sovereignty. Art appeared not as an expression of individual genius or political authority but as a shared symbolic activity through which a community understood itself and its place in the world.

Instead of fascism’s cult of leadership, Bataille discovered a humanity whose earliest masterpieces emerged from participation rather than domination, anonymity rather than glory, and collective creation rather than the cult of personality.

The political implications of these observations became increasingly difficult to ignore during the rise of the totalitarian regimes that would engulf much of Europe and Asia. In his 1933 essay “The Psychological Structure of Fascism,” Bataille analyzed the attraction to sovereignty, authority, and charismatic leadership. In 1936, he founded Acéphale, an anti-fascist intellectual group whose symbol was a headless human figure.

The image was deliberately provocative. Against the Führer, Il Duce, Stalin, and every cult of leadership, Bataille proposed a humanity without a head. The figure was less of a political statement than a symbolic reversal of the principles celebrated by totalitarian movements. Against sovereignty, he imagined forms of collective existence that could not be reduced to a single authority. Against hierarchy, he emphasized participation, reciprocity, and shared experiences.

Prehistory became important not because it provided an alternative mythology, but because it revealed a past that resisted mythological simplification. Bataille turned to caves such as Lascaux as they seemed to preserve traces of human existence before nations, before states, and before centralized authority. What he found there was not an original people or an ancestral race, but forms of collective life that escaped the categories through which modern politics often tends to understand itself.

Against Hobbes

In this sense, Bataille’s reading of prehistory amounted to a direct challenge to one of the founding myths of modern political thought. In Leviathan(1651), Thomas Hobbes famously described life before political authority as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Human beings, he argued, originally lived in a condition of universal conflict—a “war of all against all”—from which only a sovereign power could rescue them.

This image has shaped centuries of political theory. It continues to influence assumptions about human nature and social order. If conflict is primordial, hierarchy appears necessary. If competition is humanity’s defining characteristic, strong authority becomes easier to justify.

Yet few anthropologists, archaeologists, or evolutionary researchers today would recognize early human societies that were part of Hobbes’s description. Over the past century, discoveries from prehistory have gradually eroded the picture of humanity emerging from a primordial war of all against all. Instead, these findings have shed light on how the social bond preceded sovereignty.

Cooperation and Human Success

Research in the 21st century has begun to explain the reasoning behind this. Far from being a secondary achievement of civilization, cooperation was one of the conditions that made civilization possible. Human infants require years of care, and this knowledge needs to be transmitted across generations. Food sharing, communication, and reciprocity were not late cultural inventions. They were essential to survival.

Increasingly, researchers describe Homo sapiens as a uniquely hyper-cooperative species. In a landmark study published in the journal Nature in 2014, the authors argued that cooperative breeding and exceptional levels of social cooperation played a decisive role in the evolution of human cognition and culture. Shared childcare, collective learning, and social transmission enabled forms of cumulative culture unmatched elsewhere in the animal world.

Human beings did not become cooperative because civilization imposed cooperation upon them: civilization became possible because humans were already cooperative. American anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy makes a similar point in Mothers and Others, stating that networks of care extending far beyond biological parents helped shape human evolution. Humans survived because they learned to depend upon one another.

Developmental and comparative psychologist Michael Tomasello reaches a similar conclusion. In A Natural History of Human Morality, he argues that what distinguishes human cognition is not superior individual intelligence but the capacity for shared intentionality—the ability to coordinate attention, goals, and actions with others. Human intelligence, in this view, is fundamentally social.

A similar intuition reappears today in discussions about artificial intelligence (AI). Blaise Agüera y Arcas, an AI researcher, has argued that intelligence is not simply an individual property but something that emerges through communication, learning, and exchange. Language may be less of an instrument of individual advantage than a technology of collective intelligence.

While Hobbes saw society emerging from conflict, many contemporary scholars suggest that society was shaped by cooperation.

The Archaeology of Possibility

The same shift has transformed our understanding of political development. In The Dawn of Everything, authors David Graeber and David Wengrow challenge the familiar narrative of how human societies progressed through a fixed sequence—bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and states—becoming more hierarchical at every stage.

Drawing on decades of archaeological research, they describe societies that repeatedly experimented with different political arrangements. Some adopted hierarchical structures only temporarily before abandoning them. Others alternated between centralized and decentralized forms of organization according to seasonal rhythms. Large populations sometimes existed without kings, standing armies, or centralized bureaucracies. These accounts make human history look less like a march toward the state and more like a field of political experimentation.

The implications of this outlook extend well beyond archaeology. If hierarchy is not inevitable, authoritarianism can no longer present itself as the culmination of human development. If human beings repeatedly invented different ways of organizing collective life, then political alternatives are not utopian fantasies. They are historical realities. The past does not reveal our destiny, but another possibility of how to exist.

Deep History Against Race

The anti-fascist implications of prehistory became especially visible during the 20th century.

As Nazi scholars attempted to transform archaeology into a science of racial origins, other researchers moved in the opposite direction. In Man Makes Himself, archaeologist V. Gordon Childe emphasized that human progress is a result of innovation, exchange, and collective invention, instead of a biological destiny. Anthropologist Franz Boas’s The Mind of Primitive Mandismantled theories of racial hierarchy and demonstrated that cultural differences were historical rather than biological. Ethnologist Paul Rivet’s studies of migration and the peopling of the Americas highlighted human circulation, encounter, and mixture over purity and permanence in the region. Working in different disciplines, these researchers arrived at a similar conclusion: the deeper one investigates human history, the less sustainable are the ideas of fixed origins and permanent identities.

Advances in the 21st century in genetics have further strengthened this conclusion. Ancient DNA research has transformed our understanding of the past as dramatically as the discovery of cave art transformed our understanding of prehistoric culture a century ago. Across Eurasia and beyond, genetic studies have revealed repeated episodes of migration, admixture, and exchange that challenge older narratives of stable and isolated populations.

Far from revealing isolated groups preserving fixed identities over millennia, genetics shows continuous movement and transformation. Even Homo sapiens bear the marks of encounters with other human groups, including Neanderthals and Denisovans.

The further we travel into the past, the harder it becomes to sustain fantasies of racial purity.

Why Bataille’s Thinking Remains Important

Prehistory does not provide a political program. It does not tell us how contemporary societies should be organized, nor does it reveal a lost golden age. The important point is not that prehistoric humanity was peaceful, egalitarian, or morally superior. Human violence is ancient. So are domination and conflict.

The lesson is something else.

Deep history undermines some of the stories authoritarian ideologies tell us about humanity. Against the myths of racial purity, it reveals a mixture of races. Against myths of primordial hierarchy, it reveals experimentation with political structure. Against myths of sovereign necessity, it reveals human cooperation. Against myths of fixed identity, it reveals transformation.

Bataille understood that prehistory was not simply about origins. It was also about what happens when origin stories lose their authority. Now, with nationalism and authoritarian politics again looking for acknowledgment in ancestry, identity, and destiny, deep history offers a different perspective. The further back we go, the harder it is for fascism to find validity in historical narratives. Instead, what comes into view is a history of movement and exchange, cooperation and shared invention.

Prehistory doesn’t excuse domination. It doesn’t erase it, either. It places domination in perspective. And at a moment when authoritarianism is once again on the rise, the deep past reveals something both humbling and reassuring: our greatest strength has never been purity or domination, but our capacity to cooperate, connect, and depend on one another.

Credit Line: This article was produced by Human Bridges.

About Yann Perreau
Yann Perreau is a writer, educator, contemporary art curator, and writing fellow for the Human Bridges project of the Independent Media Institute. He has published several books with French publishers on climate, anonymity, and more. His articles have appeared in many publications, including Le Monde, the London Review of Books, and Art Press. He has served as a cultural attaché for both the French Embassy in London and the French Consulate in Los Angeles. He holds an MPhil in art history from Paris's EHESS.
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Ritual, Power, And The Weekend Arena – OpEd

President Donald J. Trump and UFC CEO Dana White arrive at UFC Freedom 250, the mixed martial arts event produced by the Ultimate Fighting Championship, Sunday, June 14, 2026, on the South Lawn of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Daniel Torok)

June 18, 2026 
By Gary M. Feinman


In a March 2026 paper published in the journal Science Advances, which focused on variability in governance along the autocratic-democratic axis, my coauthors and I found that one of the strongest associations for the 40 case observations, which were part of our study, was between the nature of rituals and the concentration of power.

For this global sample, autocratically organized societies were characterized by spectacles that foment fear and awe, while participatory rituals predominated in more democratically organized contexts. For example, in the region where I study (Oaxaca, Mexico), when governance was typified by distributed power relations, the pre-Hispanic rubber ball game was played in a large court adjacent to a broad, flat open plaza, the Main Plaza at Monte Albán, a space that could accommodate many of the settlement’s inhabitants. Later, however, as political power became more concentrated, the size of ball courts was reduced, access to them became more restricted, and some were even built immediately adjacent to the houses or palaces of ruling families.

Social scientists have long recognized that communal rituals are a universal human experience that binds people together in various ways. Spectacles, often rich in disorienting noise, shock, and awe, tend to captivate observers through the powerful figures at the center of the spectacle, who inspire fear and wonderment, reinforcing authoritarian cults of personality. In contrast, participatory rituals like communal dancing, singing, or chanting tend to instill camaraderie among participants, solidarity, and trust among those involved. As a student of history and a sports fan, the mirrored reflections of the past provide an analytical perspective about the final Knicks game on June 13, a sports agenda that cannot be ignored.

During the 2026 National Basketball Association playoff between the New York Knicks and the San Antonio Spurs, Madison Square Garden, the storied home of the Knicks, once again became like a civic commons after a 53-year championship drought. The competitiveness of the Knicks during the playoffs elevated the space from merely being a site of entertainment to a participatory ritual arena. The crowd did not passively observe; it chanted, rose, groaned, anticipated, and collectively willed momentum into existence. One needed to only look at the faces in the stands—season ticket holders and first-timers, celebrities and subway riders alike—to notice that the sight was closer to what might be considered an integrative ritual: one in which meaning is not imposed from above but generated, often with spontaneity, among participants.


Basketball, by definition, is a team sport, but this is typified by the game that the Knicks currently play. It is not about consistent domination by a central figure. Even the most celebrated player, Jalen Brunson, depends on coordination, timing, and trust in his teammates. The drama unfolds collectively, and its outcome remains contingent on who makes a foul shot and who grabs a rebound. Participation matters—not just symbolically but materially. The arena amplifies the idea, however imperfectly enacted, that communal engagement shapes outcomes. And these outcomes transcended the arenas where the Knicks games were played, stimulating joy and collective actions, and bringing people together in the desire for a common outcome.

By contrast, the spectacle of an Ultimate Fighting Championship event, staged in a garish steel cage, on the grounds of the White House on June 14 operated on a fundamentally different ritual logic. It was not designed for mutual participation but for spectacle: with the concentration of attention onto a staged center, where one-on-one conflict and mayhem are distilled into physical dominance and symbolic submission. The audience’s role is not to join but to witness—to be awed, to see blood and hear pain, be unsettled, and ultimately to orient themselves toward the figures who command the stage and oversee the event.

The choice of venue was not incidental. The White House has long functioned as a site of state ritual. But traditionally, those rituals—press briefings, public ceremonies, even contentious protests beyond its gates—are tethered, at least aspirationally, to norms of decorum, accountability, and public engagement. Introducing a choreographed combat spectacle into that space shifts its symbolic significance. It recasts a locus of governance into an arena of performance, where the aesthetic of dominance and self-promotion, by a small network of cronies, overshadows any ethical prospect of leading to wider participation.


This is precisely the distinction our comparative work on governance and ritual helps illuminate. When power is broadly distributed, rituals tend to be inclusive, iterative, and co-constructed. They require participants to see one another as collaborators in a shared process, even when competition is involved. In contrast, when power is tightly concentrated, rituals often become spectacles—staged experiences that reinforce hierarchy, channel emotions toward a focal point, and reduce the audience to spectators instead of actors. The Knicks, for all the commercialism of modern sports, still lean toward the former model. Their playoff games invited identification not with an owner but with a collective—however abstract—called a team, a city, a fan base. Victory was widely shared across an entire metropolitan area, communally. The ritual binds laterally, person-to-person.

A UFC spectacle staged in the orbit of political power points in the other direction. It binds vertically. The emotional energy of the crowd is drawn upward and inward, toward a center that is insulated from participation. The unpredictability of sport is replaced by an orchestrated spectacle; even the violence, ostensibly raw, is framed and contained to produce maximum symbolic effect. None of this is to suggest that one form of ritual is wholly virtuous and the other entirely malign. Spectacle has always been part of human societies, and participatory rituals can exclude to the same extent as they can include. Madison Square Garden is not immune to hierarchy, nor is fandom evenly accessible. But the contrast remains as glaring as instructive because it reveals not just different entertainments, but different models of how people relate to power—and to one another.

At stake is more than this season’s recreational programming. Rituals, whether ancient ball games in Mesoamerica or modern sporting events in New York, are not peripheral to political life; they are constitutive of it. They shape how individuals experience belonging, authority, and agency. They encode assumptions about who acts and who is meant to watch. The event at the White House reinforces values such as “might makes right” and life is a “zero-sum game.”


Alternatively, in an era when democratic practices often feel attenuated, the spaces where participation is still enacted—even imperfectly—carry heightened significance, thereby fostering shared aims and emphasizing the potential win-win-win outcomes that interdependence and collaborative action can generate. The roar of a crowd that believes its collective voice matters stands in quiet contrast to spectacles that ask only for attention, passivity, and allegiance.

We would do well to recognize the difference.

Credit Line: This article was produced by Human Bridges, a project of the Independent Media Institute.


About Gary M. Feinman
Gary M. Feinman is the MacArthur curator of Mesoamerican, Central American, and East Asian anthropology, at the Negaunee Integrative Research Center.
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