During the height of the transatlantic slave trade, from 1500 to 1850, some 12 million people were enslaved, most from West and West Central Africa. Diverse cultures, languages, traditions, and religions were found in these regions, but the ethnic and geographic origins of most of these individuals are lost to history. This is no longer the case for three slaves who were buried on the Caribbean island of St. Martin in the seventeenth century.

Researchers from the University of Copenhagen and the Stanford University School of Medicine have employed a new technique for studying fragmented DNA to learn more about where these individuals came from. DNA does not last long in the tropics, but the researchers found small bits of it in tooth roots, which they then subjected to a technique called whole-genome capture. This allowed them to isolate and identify enough DNA to compare with modern samples from West Africa. One of the slaves belonged to a Bantu-speaking population in northern Cameroon, while the other two came from non-Bantu-speaking groups in Nigeria and Ghana. Though they were buried together, these three people may not have had a language in common.

“The findings demonstrate that genomic data can be used to trace the genetic ancestry of long-dead and poorly preserved individuals,” says lead researcher Hannes Schroeder of the Natural History Museum of Denmark, “a finding with important implications for archeology, especially in cases where historical information is missing.”

More than 100 years ago, eight eagle talons were excavated from a famous Neanderthal site called Krapina, and subsequently left in a drawer at the Croatian Natural History Museum in Zagreb. Davorka Radovčic recently took over as curator, and she discovered the talons while reexamining the museum’s collections. She noticed several deep cut marks and evidence that the talons had been strung together as a necklace. The talons have been dated to about 130,000 years ago, predating the arrival of Homo sapiens in the area by about 50,000 years. The talon necklace is now thought to be the earliest known symbolic Neanderthal artifact.

Several mass graves—one of which includes the remains of at least 150 bodies—have been discovered beneath a Paris supermarket located just a mile from Notre Dame Cathedral. The French National Institute of Preventive Archaeological Research (INRAP) unearthed the graves in advance of an expansion of the supermarket’s basement.

Based on the largest grave’s placement among other underground features, archaeologists believe it dates to between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. The people in the grave, men and women of all ages as well as children, appear to have been the victims of a fierce epidemic, most likely plague. The bodies were buried snugly, with children nestled into spaces between adults, says Mark Guillon, a physical anthropologist with INRAP Paris and the French National Center for Scientific Research in Bordeaux. A hospital cemetery consisting largely of individual burials was located nearby, though it is unclear whether there is any connection between the two sets of burials.