Perhaps no ancient historian is more respected than Herodotus. However, a recent study has raised questions about his reliability. Herodotus provides the best-known passage on ancient Egyptian mummification techniques, recording how the brains of elites were removed through the nose, and their viscera through an incision in the abdomen. For the lower classes, the less costly route was to flush the corpse’s entrails with a turpentine-like cedar-oil enema. But Andrew Wade and Andrew Nelson of the University of Western Ontario examined 150 recent reports on Egyptian mummies and seven CT scans—and found that Herodotus was a bit off. Their findings indicate that abdominal incisions were the most common means of removing the inner organs, and not reserved just for the upper classes. And the researchers identified almost no evidence of the eviscerating oil. Furthermore, only 25 percent of the mummies studied retained the heart in situ—a surprising number, considering the ancient sources emphasize that this organ was almost always left intact.

Between 1968 and 1972, NASA successfully launched 11 manned Apollo missions, six of which landed on the surface of the moon. Each time, the F-1 rocket engines used to power them into orbit were jettisoned into the Atlantic at 5,000 miles per hour, minutes after liftoff. Jeff Bezos, billionaire founder of Amazon.com, recently funded a deep-water mission to recover some of these relics of the space race.

In late March 2013, Bezos, who credits the Apollo program with inspiring his technological ambitions, revealed that his team’s three-week expedition recovered enough parts to reassemble two engines from “an incredible sculpture garden of twisted F-1 engines” sitting three miles underwater. The parts, which are the property of NASA, are undergoing restoration that will hopefully reveal serial numbers that could tie them to specific missions.

A necropolis recently discovered in northern France is providing remarkable new evidence of the La Tène Culture, enigmatic warriors who once dominated most of Iron Age Europe. The 15 richly adorned graves, 14 of which have been excavated thus far, were found near the town of Buchères and date to the fourth and third centuries B.C. The La Tène, named after a village in Switzerland where evidence of it was first found, was a Celtic culture that developed north of the Alps in the middle of the first millennium B.C. From there, its people migrated and spread their influence from Romania to Britain.

The 640 acres on which the La Tène necropolis is located are scheduled for commercial and economic development. The excavations are being conducted by L’Institut National de Recherches Archéologiques Préventives (INRAP), an organization that specializes in salvage archaeology. The most impressive burials belong to five warriors who were furnished in death with the full military panoply of the day. Bestowed upon the warriors were lances, shields, and swords, including one spectacular 28-inch example still in its scabbard.

Not far from these men, women were interred with a lavish assortment of bronze jewelry. Several women wore high-quality torques around their necks. Although their clothing has long disappeared, the remains of exquisite pins and coral-inlay brooches speak to the one-time splendor of their dress. There is no evidence of children’s graves, which the researchers say is not unusual for a La Tène cemetery.