Archaeologists from the French National Center for Scientific Research working in a large building at the site of Mudhmar East near the city of Adam in Oman have made an “exceptional find.” Inside the structure, which is thought to have had a religious function, the team uncovered a collection of bronze weapons dating to between 900 and 600 B.C. The metal artifacts—two very rare quivers (ordinarily made of leather) with arrows, five battleaxes, five daggers, 50 arrowheads, and five bows, are too small to have been used in combat and were, explains project director Guillaume Gernez, perhaps intended as offerings to a war god. This region of the Arabian Peninsula, which sits at an important crossroads of ancient trade routes on the border between Oman’s desert and oases, is almost entirely archaeologically unexplored.

Peruvian archaeologists have found the 4,600-year-old remains of a woman decked out in finery, including a shell necklace, bone brooches, and blankets made of cotton and woven reeds. The bones were discovered at Áspero, a major site of the north-coast Caral civilization, the oldest known urban society in the Americas, which dates to four millennia before the Inca. “We can interpret that, some 4,600 years before the present, women had already reached significant positions in society,” says archaeologist Ruth Shady Solís. The brooches in particular, carved into bird and monkey designs, point to “a woman of prestige.” The necklace’s shells must have been brought from Peru’s far north coast and the Amazon lowlands, both hundreds of miles away, further proof of her high status. Despite the fancy accessories, the woman, who was between 40 and 50 years old when she died, saw trauma in life. She had three major bone fractures, likely caused by a fall, and a skull deformation.

In 1976, paleoanthropologist Mary Leakey discovered the oldest known hominin footprints. The footprints, in Laetoli, Tanzania, have been dated to around 3.66 million years ago and are thought to have been left by members of the species Australopithecus afarensis. They consist of two parallel tracks: undisturbed prints from a single individual and a set of overlapping prints from at least two ancient primates.

In the decades since the discovery, attention has focused on the undisturbed prints, in part because the overlapping ones have been considered too fragmentary to study. Experts have estimated that the individual who left the undisturbed prints stood just over four feet, three inches, and walked at around 1.4 miles per hour. However, there has been extended debate over how efficiently this individual’s feet worked compared with those of modern humans. Formulating answers to this question has been complicated by the limited sample size—a single track from just one individual.

But now, a team at Bournemouth University in England has developed a software package called DigTrace and created a digital model of the footprints left by one of the other individuals. The team used the software, which is also being applied to modern crime scene analysis, to create 3-D scans of the overlapping footprints and isolate one set. They estimate that the individual who left these was around five feet tall, and walked at approximately the same pace as the individual who left the undisturbed prints. Team leader Matthew Bennett says that comparison of the two sets of footprints suggests that the feet of these individuals worked at a level of efficiency similar to that of modern humans. “This debate has raged for 40 years based on the gait of one individual representing an entire species,” Bennett adds. “Now, at least, we’re making the debate on the basis of two individuals.”