In a cave in southern Italy in 1963, archaeologists found two skeletons buried in an embrace 12,000 years earlier, one of them long assumed to be male — ancient DNA from their bones revealed in 2026 that both were female and related, and that the younger carried the same rare growth-disorder mutation still seen in children today

In a cave in southern Italy in 1963, archaeologists found two skeletons buried in an embrace 12,000 years earlier, one of them long assumed to be male — ancient DNA from their bones revealed in 2026 that both were female and related, and that the younger carried the same rare growth-disorder mutation still seen in children today

In 1963, archaeologists excavating the Romito Cave in Calabria, at the toe of southern Italy, uncovered a Paleolithic burial that has been reproduced in textbooks ever since: two individuals laid to rest together roughly 12,000 years ago, positioned so closely that one appears to be embracing the other. For decades, one of the two, the smaller of the pair, was widely assumed to have been a young man with a form of dwarfism, based on the shape an…