Belgium’s King Albert I was found dead at the foot of a cliff in the Ardennes region one night in February 1934. The official story holds that the avid mountaineer fell while climbing solo, but conspiracy theorists have long suspected he had been murdered or committed suicide elsewhere, and was transported there. Genetic testing of blood on leaves—taken as souvenirs by people who mobbed the site after his death—may have ruled these scenarios out.

In 2013, a journalist purchased some of these leaves, which had been mounted, and turned them over to researchers, who established that they were indeed stained with human blood. A team led by Maarten Larmuseau of the University of Leuven found that genetic material in the blood matches that of two of Albert’s living relatives, one from each side of his family. Researchers believe that his blood would not have gotten onto the leaves unless he had fallen, which, alongside archival evidence, undermines the conspiracy theories. “There were no witnesses, so we will never know the truth,” says Larmuseau. “But the most likely hypothesis is that he just fell.”

Early Chinese histories tell of a hero named Yu the Great who founded the Xia Dynasty, the country’s first. According to legend, the region had been plagued by floods for decades, and Yu rose to prominence for taming them. Little sign of these floods had been found until recently, when a team of researchers reported evidence of a massive deluge of the Yellow River around 4,000 years ago.

The researchers, led by Qinglong Wu of Peking University, found that a landslide caused by an earthquake created a natural dam some 650 feet high at the upper reaches of the river. After building up for six to nine months, water broke through, resulting in a “Great Flood,” one of the biggest of the last 10,000 years, says Darryl Granger, a geologist at Purdue University. He adds that the inundation would have extended more than 1,000 miles downstream and overwhelmed and rerouted the river’s network of tributaries, leading to years of uncontrolled annual flooding.

To estimate the date of the initial flood, which could also help date the dynasty, the researchers looked at Lajia, a downstream Neolithic settlement thought to have been destroyed by the same earthquake that set off the landslide. Human remains at the settlement were dated to around 1920 B.C. Solid evidence of the Xia Dynasty in the region remains to be uncovered, explains archaeologist David Cohen of National Taiwan University, but “if its founding is really tied to the control of a Great Flood, now for the first time we have a candidate for such a large flood.”

Archaeologists at Akaki, about 20 miles from the Cypriot capital of Nicosia, have uncovered a rare mosaic depicting a horse-racing venue known as a hippodrome. The work, one of fewer than 10 extant ancient mosaics on the subject in the world, was likely part of a lavish villa from the fourth century A.D., when the Romans controlled Cyprus. The villa site so far measures more than 36 feet long and 13 feet wide, though it may well be much larger. Although horse races were some of the most important spectacles staged by the emperor, they are an especially unusual artistic subject in the eastern Mediterranean. Notably, above each four-wheeled chariot are inscribed two names, which Cyprus Department of Antiquities archaeologist Fryni Hadjichristofi believes belong to the charioteer and one of the horses.