Nearly a million years ago, a small group of hominins walked near an estuary on the English coast 140 miles northeast of London, leaving footprints in the soft mud, which then hardened. Last summer, archaeologists working at the nearby site of Happisburgh, which dates to around the same time, discovered those footprints. They are the oldest footprints known outside of Africa—49 of them, made by at least five individuals, including some children. “One can imagine a small family group walking along the edge of the estuary looking for seaweed or shellfish,” says Nicholas Ashton of London’s Natural History Museum. Some of the footprints were lifted out of the site in a block of sediment before they could be eroded away by the tide. The sediment will be CT scanned to provide a more detailed picture of the stature and gait of the people, probably Homo antecessor, who made the prints.

Bronze Age mummies in China’s Taklamakan Desert were buried with the earliest known pieces of cheese affixed to their necks and chests. Chemist Andrej Shevchenko of the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden came to that conclusion after analyzing several enigmatic pieces of yellow matter found on the mummies, which date to between 1980 and 1450 B.C.

Shevchenko was able to isolate proteins characteristic of cheese in the samples, and was even able to identify the kinds of yeast and bacteria used in the fermentation process. “That’s what makes this so exciting,” says Shevchenko. “We know that cheese was made as early as the sixth millennium B.C.., but this is the first evidence that shows just how people were making it.” Shevchenko points out that just 20 years ago organic matter such as these pieces of cheese might have been ignored and disposed of. “With the technology we have now, no one should throw out anything,” says Shevchenko.

Elephants were the tanks of ancient Mediterranean warfare, commonly used for trampling and intimidating enemies. Yet there was only one battle in which African elephants and their Asian cousins are known to have met—the Battle of Raphia, in Gaza, in 217 B.C. According to the historian Polybius, it wasn’t even a contest. He writes that the African pachyderms, under the command of the Ptolemaic pharaoh of Egypt, panicked and tried to flee at the sight of the larger Asian elephants of the Seleucid army. Yet African savannah elephants are typically bigger and stronger than Asian ones. Had Polybius gotten it wrong? Modern writers have speculated that the Egyptians had African forest elephants, a smaller species than the savannah variety. Later Roman and Carthaginian armies, including Hannibal’s forces, might also have used forest elephants. 

That idea has crept into modern accounts, depictions, and even video games such as Age of Empires, in which war elephants have the rounded ears and dwarfish proportions of the forest dwellers. Now geneticists have found that the species of elephant that the Egyptians had access to came from modern-day Eritrea in East Africa, and share no genetic markers with forest elephants. “The idea that they used forest elephants was not based on evidence, but it got repeated over and over,” says geneticist Alfred Roca of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “It makes no sense. Forest elephants lived in the Congo basin, thousands of miles from the Mediterranean.” The matter of Polybius’ account remains unsettled.