A new discovery on the island of Luzon pushes back the arrival of humans in the Philippines from 67,000 years ago to more than 700,000 years ago. An international team of researchers studied 57 stone tools found at the site of Kalinga alongside rhinoceros bones that show evidence of cut marks made while butchering them. Some of the bones had also been smashed open, suggesting that people were after the nutrient-rich marrow.

This discovery supports the suggestion that hominins during the Middle Pleistocene (781,000–126,000 years ago) were able to build watercraft capable of ocean crossings and could navigate the South China Sea to reach Luzon from mainland Asia. At the moment, the researchers are hesitant to pin down which human ancestor may have made the journey, suggesting that it may have been either Homo erectus or early members of the recently identified Denisovans who undertook the journey.

A thin lead curse tablet dating to the fifth century A.D. that was folded and nailed shut to intensify its power has recently been opened, some 80 years after it was discovered beneath the hippodrome in Antioch, in modern-day Turkey. Curse tablets from the period are generally in Greek or Latin, but this one, although difficult to make out with the naked eye, turns out to have been written in a Jewish dialect of Aramaic using Hebrew lettering. “This means it was written by a Jewish scribe,” says Rivka Elitzur-Leiman of Tel Aviv University, “if not a Jewish magician.”

Working around holes in the text where the nail punched through, Elitzur-Leiman and Margaretha Folmer of Leiden University are now deciphering the tablet’s message with photos taken using reflectance transformation imaging. The tablet’s curse seems to have been aimed at disabling opposing horses in a chariot race. It calls on God and his angels to drown the opponents and on a particular angel, who stood in front of Balaam’s donkey in the Book of Numbers, to block the opponents’ way.

Researchers at Eleutherna, a fortified city-state in Crete that reached its apogee around 800 B.C., have concluded that a woman whose remains were discovered at the site in 2009 spent her life crafting ceramics. Using a range of technology, including medical imaging and anatomical models, the team, led by anthropologist Anagnostis Agelarakis of Adelphi University, found patterns of skeletal wear consistent with years spent seated and working clay on a kick-wheel-operated turntable, making the woman the only known female master ceramicist in the ancient Greek world. Significantly, Eleutherna has an association with women in positions of importance and power. Four women related to one another and thought to have been priestesses were discovered in ornately furnished burials nearby. “While this is a rare discovery in Greek archaeology,” Agelarakis says, “in some ways it is unsurprising given the importance and privileged social position of the Eleuthernian matriline.”