The bacterium that causes bubonic plague, Yersinia pestis, has been responsible for some of the most devastating pandemics in history, including the Black Death, which killed more than half of Europe’s population in the fourteenth century. The first recorded outbreak was the sixth-century A.D. Justinian Plague, but researchers have now found evidence that a virulent form of the bacterium was circulating at least as early as 1800 B.C.

The team sequenced the genomes of Y. pestis recovered from two Bronze Age skeletons—one male and one female—buried together in southwestern Russia. They determined that the strain with which the pair was infected had developed mutations that allowed it to be carried by fleas. Researchers are unsure how earlier known strains of the bacterium were spread, but they are certain that fleas spread plague efficiently, allowing it to reach pandemic levels. “We know of a lot of historical outbreaks of disease for which the causes have not yet been identified,” says Maria Spyrou of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. “Now that we know that Y. pestis has been capable of causing epidemics in humans for the past 4,000 years, we have to start screening more material to determine whether it could have been involved.” The team hopes to find evidence of early plague outbreaks that have gone unrecorded.

Swiss archaeologists were baffled when they first saw the bronze hand wearing a gold foil bracelet. All the evidence—including radiocarbon dating of vegetable glue used to affix the gold foil and the style of a bronze dagger found along with the hand—suggests the unusual artifact was fashioned in the mid-second millennium B.C. But nothing like it is known from the period.

At the site where the hand was found—a spectacular plateau in the shadow of the Alps and the Jura Mountains—archaeologists unearthed a man’s skeleton, along with a missing finger from the bronze hand as well as a bronze pin and spiral and several gold flakes. The hand’s purpose is enigmatic. “It may have been this man’s insignia,” says Andrea Schaer of the Archaeological Service of the Canton of Bern, “and when he died it was buried with him.” She says the hand also may have served as a symbolic replacement for one perhaps lost by the man during his life, though it is too delicate to have been a practical prosthetic.

One of the most intriguing questions in American archaeology is, Who were the earliest people in the Americas? For much of the past 80 years, scholars have thought that they were members of the Clovis culture, whose ancestors came to North America from Siberia some 13,000 years ago. In recent decades, however, archaeologists have come to believe that people reached North America far earlier. A new discovery from the Gault site, in central Texas, offers robust evidence not only for a much earlier peopling of the Americas, but also of a previously unknown tool tradition that is older and more varied than scholars ever expected.

Archaeologists have found stone tools including projectile points, blades, and flake tools at the Gault site, the oldest of which date to between 20,000 and 16,000 years ago, thousands of years older than any of the fluted stone spear points for which the Clovis are known. “What we’re seeing is a well-developed toolkit,” says Tom Williams of Texas State University. “These were clearly people adapted to surviving in their environment.”