Among the treasures discovered in King Tut’s tomb is an elaborate pectoral with a central scarab carved from a canary-yellow material called Libyan Desert glass. Found in the sand dunes of Egypt’s western desert, the glass was formed about 29 million years ago when a quantity of quartz melted at a temperature in excess of 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit, which is hotter than the inside of a volcano. Scholars have long debated whether the yellow glass was created by a meteor that exploded aboveground or by a meteorite impact.

To test these hypotheses, geologist Aaron Cavosie of Curtin University searched glass samples for grains of the mineral zircon that hadn’t broken down under the intense heat that formed the glass. He identified a small number of preserved zircon grains whose crystal orientation indicated that they had transformed from reidite, a mineral that can only be formed by a meteorite strike. “This provides the first bulletproof evidence that Libyan Desert glass was formed by a meteorite impact,” says Cavosie. No impact crater resulting from such an event has ever been located, he explains, though it may lie beneath shifting dunes or may have eroded to such a degree that it’s no longer distinguishable on the landscape. 

Luminaries constituting a veritable who’s who of late medieval Europe are depicted on a cache of 10 gold and 24 silver coins found inside a bronze box buried beneath the floor of a late fifteenth- or early sixteenth-century house in Dijon, France. Almost all the coins were minted outside France, mainly in locations within the Holy Roman Empire and on the Italian peninsula, according to archaeologists from France’s National Institute of Preventive Archaeological Research.

The historical figures portrayed on the coins include some of the continent’s most prominent power brokers: Ercole II d’Este, the duke of Ferrara and grandson of the notorious Pope Alexander VI; the powerful German bishop Philip I of Palatinate; Pope Innocent VIII; and the wealthy Venetian doge Nicolo Tron, among others. Also hidden in the box was a green and white enameled gold pendant typical of wedding medallions, which features the initials V and C interlaced with a gold braid.

A rare view of family life some 14,000 years ago has been made possible by recent studies and 3-D modeling of the traces left by a group of five people who walked, crawled, and explored their way through Grotta della Basura in the Liguria region of northern Italy. The cave was originally explored in the 1950s, but an international team of researchers recently modeled 180 footprints, as well as finger- and knee prints. They retraced the movements of the group— two adults, one preadolescent, one six-year-old, and a three-year-old—and reconstructed how they explored the cave. They can be “seen” hugging the cave’s edge, crouching down and walkcrawling where the ceiling drops low, and falling into a single-file line, with the three-year-old at the back, in one of the cave’s narrow chambers. In the chamber farthest from the entrance, called the Room of Mysteries, smears of clay on a stalagmite—a sort of Paleolithic finger painting—were made by the two youngest children.