Archaeologists excavating a seventeenth-century Dutch merchant ship off southern England have recovered a 30-foot-long oak rudder decorated with a Baroque carving of a mustachioed man. Bournemouth University’s David Parham first saw the carving while surveying the wreck. “It was a shock,” he says. “Usually in archaeology you only encounter skeletal remains of people. But this carving had to have been modeled on a real person. Here I was looking at him face to face. He struck me as looking mournful.” 

Snails aren’t known for their ability to get around. But then there’s the strange case of Ireland’s grove snails, Cepaea nemoralis, a common European land species. Geneticists from the University of Nottingham looked closely at the lineages of this species and found that the Irish variety is most closely related to the lineage found in the Pyrenees, along the French-Spanish border—and nowhere else. There are a number of other species, including the strawberry tree and the Kerry slug, with similar distribution patterns. The researchers believe that direct movement of Mesolithic people between the two sites is the simplest explanation for the unexpected biogeographic quirk. People are known to have been in Ireland around 8,000 years ago, when the snails first appeared, and grove snails are known to have been on the Mesolithic menu across the Mediterranean. The snails may have been more than hitchhikers—they may have been cargo. 

Neanderthals seem to have produced a remarkably consistent set of stone tools for hundreds of thousands of years. Two new studies suggest that this presumed lack of diversity and innovation might not be the whole story. 

Karen Ruebens, an archaeologist at the University of Southampton, analyzed more than 1,300 stone tools from European Neanderthal sites dated to between 115,000 and 35,000 years ago. She found that they belong to at least two distinct tool-making traditions. West of the Rhine River, Neanderthal hand axes are oval or roughly triangular, while to the east, they are rounded on one edge and flat on the other. Near the Rhine, the traditions seem to overlap, as if two cultures were sharing their techniques. 

A separate study, led by Marie Soressi at Leiden University, shows that Neanderthals also may have taught our Homo sapiens ancestors a thing or two. Soressi’s analysis shows that Neanderthals were using bone tools called lissoirs to process animal hides several thousand years before the first modern humans arrived in Europe and started making the same type of tool. While it has long been thought that H. sapiens were the progenitors of the practice, Neanderthals may actually have been more creative in their tool-making than was previously thought.