Recent analysis of the only intact Viking boat burial ever discovered on the British mainland has revealed new information about the identity, culture, and origins of the interred individual. The tenth-century grave, which belonged to a high-status warrior, was first discovered in 2011 in western Scotland. Isotope analysis of two teeth indicates that the occupant of the grave was likely born in Scandinavia. The grave assemblage included several weapons, typical of Viking warrior burials, and other items related more to daily life such as food preparation and farming. The artifacts came from a wide range of sources, including Ireland, Scotland, and Scandinavia, underscoring the broad geographical connections of the well-traveled warrior. Says University of Leicester archaeologist Oliver Harris, “This burial helps us learn about how Viking people were interacting and eventually settling in this part of Scotland at the time.”

In February 2017, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which owns and operates Jefferson’s home, Monticello, uncovered and began reconstructing what they believe were the personal quarters of Sally Hemings, an enslaved woman and longtime companion to the founding father. The work is part of the Mountaintop Project, a multiyear effort to peel back early twentieth-century modernization at Monticello and reveal the experience of enslaved people who lived and worked there.

Excavating in the mansion’s south pavilion, archaeologists have found rooms that housed enslaved domestic servants, including Hemings, who was the half-sister of Jefferson’s wife Martha, and, almost certainly, mother to several of his children. Ambitious even for a man of Jefferson’s stature, Monticello’s original kitchen included French-style stew stoves, which allowed cooks, including Hemings’ brother James, who was trained in Paris during Jefferson’s time as minister to France, to prepare continental haute cuisine.

“How this is all going to be interpreted is a work in progress,” says Fraser Neiman, director of archaeology at Monticello. “We are trying to get folks to think about Sally and James Hemings as people with full lives, rather than just ciphers to Thomas Jefferson.”

The Bluefish Caves, which sit along a Canadian riverbank just over the Alaska border, in northwestern Yukon Territory, were first excavated 40 years ago. The digs lasted a decade and yielded a small collection of stone tools, thousands of bone fragments, and the controversial assertion that humans inhabited the site as early as 24,800 years ago, far earlier than most other evidence suggested.

While debate over the caves has faded, University of Montreal PhD candidate Lauriane Bourgeon took a second look at 36,000 bone fragments from the excavations. After two years of analysis, she isolated 15 samples that seem to bear marks of human modification: cuts from stone tools that are deeper and thinner than if the bones had been trampled on. In cross-section, the cuts appear to be V-shaped, as opposed to the characteristic U-shape made by carnivores’ teeth. Bone samples were dated to between 12,000 and 24,000 years old, with the oldest being the jawbone of a horse that scientists believe was extinct in the region by 14,000 years ago—around the same time that humans are widely accepted to have entered North America.

The controversial new finding not only pushes the occupation of North America back by 10,000 years, it also lends credence to the Beringian standstill hypothesis, which posits that humans, while migrating from Siberia to the Americas, paused in Beringia—the ancient, now largely submerged land that included Kamchatka and Alaska—during the Last Glacial Maximum. They waited there, the theory states, until conditions improved about 17,000 years ago.

Lee Lyman, a bone-analysis expert at the University of Missouri, calls Bourgeon’s assessment that humans made the bone markings “pretty convincing.” But Ben Potter at the University of Alaska Fairbanks remains unconvinced that humans were in the region so long ago, even though he called the new work “as good as cut-mark analysis could get.” Without cultural features, such as organic residue or hearths, that can be dated and tied directly to the tools and bones, he says, the date appears to be an outlier.

“We’re lacking archaeological evidence in Beringia,” Bourgeon says in response to her critics. “We need to find more evidence. It would help people to be less skeptical of this study.”