Pathways, January 2026
Each month, we keep track of the different paths that modern life is taking and how writers are keeping up. Here are some routes we recently found in our modern life.
For this month’s “Pathways” digest we’ve combed through some of the top discoveries in archaeology from 2025 and January 2026. Here are our latest pathways to the present:
Last February, in “the first royal burial to be unearthed since the discovery of Tutankhamen in 1922,” archaeologists discovered “the last missing tomb of a king from Ancient Egypt’s Eighteenth Dynasty, King Thutmose II.”
In July 2025, researcher Enrique Jiménez used AI to reconstruct a 250-line Babylonian hymn from about 1000 B.C.E. A collaboration between the University of Baghdad and Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich began this “monumental task of digitizing every cuneiform text fragment ever discovered” in 2018. The researchers then use AI to scan the database in search of connections across manuscripts.
Also in July, archaeologists identified “Yersinia pestis, the microbe that causes plague, in a mass grave at the ancient city of Jerash, Jordan, near the pandemic's epicenter. The find definitively links the pathogen to the Justinian Plague marking the first pandemic (AD 541–750), resolving one of history's long-standing mysteries.” You can read the study here.
In August, a 1.04 million-year-old stone tool was discovered in Indonesia, revising the conventional timeline for hominins’ habitation of the region—hominins appear to have been there hundreds of thousands of years earlier than previously thought.
A study published in October supported the argument that the colossal statues of Easter Island did indeed “walk” into place— that is, they were carefully rocked back and forth by teams of 40 to the locations where they now reside, oftentimes many miles away from where they were initially carved. See an early reconstruction of this walking process from 2012 here.
Also in October, researchers found a set of animal engravings from 11,400 to 12,800 years ago in Saudi Arabia, which suggests the presence of humans in the area several thousand years earlier than scholars had supposed.
Though it doesn’t count as an archaeological discovery, there was another great find in October: two 109-year-old letters in a bottle that a woman discovered on a beach in Australia, written by soldiers heading to Europe to fight in WWI.
Last, there’s already been a major archaeological discovery this year: “One of the most complete human ancestor fossils ever found may belong to an entirely new species... The famous ‘Little Foot’ skeleton from South Africa has long been debated, but new analysis suggests it doesn’t truly match any known Australopithecus species. Instead, researchers say its unique mix of features points to a previously unidentified human relative, reshaping ideas about early human diversity.”
