The world’s oldest known cave art created by modern humans, discovered on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi and recently dated to at least 44,000 years ago, has transformed researchers’ understanding of human artistic development. The illustrations feature a number of part-human, part-animal figures hunting wild pigs and dwarf buffaloes. The painting is, therefore, the earliest figurative artwork, the earliest pictorial narrative, and the earliest evidence that people conceived of supernatural beings, which is viewed as a necessary precursor to formulating religious systems of thought. “What is most surprising is that 44,000 years ago all the concepts of art were fully developed,” says archaeologist Maxime Aubert of Griffith University. “They must have had a much earlier origin in Africa, or just after humans left Africa.”

The researchers determined the minimum age of the painting by dating mineral deposits that have formed on top of it. These deposits contain trace amounts of uranium, which decays to thorium at a steady rate. Their age can be calculated from the ratio of the two elements. More than 200 cave art sites have been documented in this region of southern Sulawesi. The newly discovered work is some 65 feet above the cave floor, which helps explain why it escaped notice until recently.

Elaborate ship burials are among the most famous and most mysterious remains of the Viking Age. During the burial ritual, an individual was laid to rest on the deck of a full-size ship, which was then interred beneath a mound of earth. Over the past century and a half, dozens of such ship burials have been discovered from Scandinavia to the British Isles. In recent months, five more have been identified in Norway and Sweden.

Specialists from the Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research detected one ship on the Norwegian island of Edoya using high-resolution georadar. The vessel, which lies just belowground, is between 40 and 50 feet long and awaits further archaeological investigation. Around 25 miles east of Edoya, on Norway’s mainland, archaeologists were perplexed by the discovery of not one, but two ship burials at a single site in Vinjeora. The first contained a man who died in the eighth century a.d. and was buried in a 30-foot boat. Around 100 years later, a well-to-do woman was buried in her own, slightly smaller ship, directly on top of the earlier burial. Her grave contained several high-quality artifacts, including a cross-shaped brooch. “We were very surprised,” says archaeologist Raymond Sauvage of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. “I know of no other examples where they reopened an earlier grave to bury a new boat in the next century.”

Sauvage believes the two must have been related, perhaps as grandfather and granddaughter. Across the border in Sweden, two additional Viking ship burials were recently unearthed outside the town of Uppsala. While one was found to have been badly damaged, the other was well-preserved. It contained a man who was sent to the afterlife with the companionship of a horse and a dog, both of which were also interred in the ship.

A fragmentary but poignant insight into the spare moments of nineteenth-century Wisconsin homesteaders has been discovered at Fort McCoy, a United States Army installation about 90 miles northwest of Madison. Archaeologists unearthed four pieces of a German-made harmonica among more than 2,000 artifacts from what appears to have been a communal dumping ground in the area. One of the harmonica’s exterior plates reads “Friedr. Hotz,” indicating that it was made by the Friedrich Hotz Company. Based in Knittlingen, Germany, the company began producing harmonicas in the 1820s and was eventually bought out by Matthias Hohner, who introduced the instrument to America in 1862. “The leisure-related items from the site represent a small portion of the assemblage,” says Colorado State University archaeologist Tyler Olsen. “This probably reflects the proportion of any given day that could be devoted to recreation in some small way.”