In 1967, archaeologists discovered a spectacular burial of two men accompanied by six male servants inside a mound in the city of Cahokia, which flourished near present-day St. Louis from around A.D. 1000 to 1250. The two bodies were found atop 22,000 shell beads that formed the shape of a bird, which in some Native American cultures is associated with military prowess. At the time it was thought that the burial was a kind of monument to male power, and it was assumed the men were warrior chiefs—part of a male-dominated hierarchy that controlled Cahokia.

When bioarchaeologists led by the Illinois State Archaeological Survey’s Thomas Emerson reexamined the remains, they were astonished to find that the skeletons in the bead burial actually belonged to a man and a woman, and that 12 bodies, including those of multiple women and a child, accompanied them. “We were flabbergasted,” says Emerson. “It’s long been gospel that these were all men.” He thinks the women were high-status members of the city’s nobility and that the discovery shows that class was more important than sex at Cahokia.

Evidence that early humans were tending fires around 800,000 years ago has been found in a cave in southeastern Spain. Excavations in Cueva Negra del Estrecho del Río Quípar have turned up hundreds of stones, stone artifacts, and animal bones, all with signs of having been subjected to fire. Dating of the site was based on evidence of a reversal of Earth’s magnetic field, known to have occurred around 780,000 years ago, in layers just above where the burned objects were found. “This is the oldest evidence of fire being tended for any site outside Africa, where fire is known from at least a million years ago,” says Michael Walker of the University of Murcia.

The benefits of controlled fire are clear—warmth, light, cooking—but a separate study suggests that modern humans evolved in a way that allowed them to take maximal advantage of it. The researchers found that modern humans have a genetic mutation that may have helped them tolerate intensely smoky conditions in caves. This may have offered an advantage over Neanderthals, who lacked the mutation.

Archaeologists working near the purported birthplace of Zeus on Mt. Lykaion recently made an eerie and unexpected discovery. Over the past decade, a Greco-American team from the Mt. Lykaion Survey and Excavation Project has been investigating the Sanctuary of Zeus, one of ancient Greece’s most mysterious and sacred locales. Near the mountain’s summit there is a massive ash mound, 100 feet in diameter, that served as a sacrificial altar from the sixteenth to the fourth centuries B.C. In the past, archaeologists there had discovered tens of thousands of animal bones, mostly from sheep and goats, which were slaughtered as part of religious rituals. However, the most recent excavations also uncovered a human burial dating to the eleventh century B.C. among the animal remains. The adolescent individual was missing part of his skull, but was otherwise carefully laid out in a stone-lined grave. The discovery is intriguing because several ancient Greek writers, including Plato and Pausanias, mention human sacrifice occurring on Mt. Lykaion. According to project codirector David Gilman Romano, detailed examination of the skeleton is under way to determine whether there is any evidence of this practice. “The find is significant,” he says, “since it is the first example of human bones to be discovered at what is confirmed as a sacrificial altar to Zeus, where thousands of animal sacrifices were made in antiquity.”