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Today, the lush, green valley surrounding the Tollense River in northeastern Germany seems like a serene place to enjoy nature.
But for archaeologists, the Tollense Valley is considered the oldest battlefield in Europe.
An amateur archaeologist first spotted a bone protruding from the riverbank in 1996.
A series of ongoing excavations since 2008 have shown that the thousands of bones and hundreds of weapons preserved in the valley’s undisturbed environment were part of a large-scale battle 3,250 years ago.
The biggest mysteries researchers want to uncover are why the battle happened and who fought in it. These are questions they are now one step closer to answering.
Long time ago
Dozens of bronze and flint arrowheads recovered from the Tollense Valley reveal details about the able-bodied warriors who fought in Bronze Age battles.
The research team analyzed and compared the arrowheads, some of which were still embedded in the remains of the fallen. Although many of these weapons were produced locally, some with different shapes came from a region that now includes modern Bavaria and Moravia.
The presence of the outliers suggests that a Southern army clashed with local tribes in the valley, and researchers suspect that the conflict began at a key landmark along the river.
Back to the future
Scientists are harnessing the power of artificial intelligence to uncover hidden archaeological sites buried beneath the sands of the vast Rub’ al-Khali desert.
The desert covers 250,000 square miles (650,000 square kilometers) on the Arabian Peninsula, and the name translates to “the empty quarter” in English. To unlock the secrets of the desolate terrain, researchers are combining machine learning with a satellite imaging technique that uses radio waves to discover objects that may be hidden beneath surfaces.
The technology will be tested in October when excavations assess whether predicted structures are present at the Saruq Al Hadid complex in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
In addition, an AI-assisted analysis has uncovered a trove of ancient symbols in Peru’s Nazca Desert, nearly doubling the number of known geoglyphs, or stones and gravel, arranged in giant shapes depicting animals, people and geometric designs.
Throughout the universe
Black holes swallow virtually any celestial body that comes too close, but they also release jets of particles and radiation — and astronomers have just observed the most gigantic black hole jets ever seen.
The pair of jets has a length of 23 million light-years and emanates from a black hole in a distant galaxy 7.5 billion light-years from Earth. Researchers have nicknamed the megastructure Porphyrion, after a giant from Greek mythology.
“We are talking about 140 Milky Way diameters in total,” says Martijn Oei, a postdoctoral researcher at the California Institute of Technology. “The Milky Way would be a tiny speck in these two giant bursts.”
The colossal scale of the jets is causing astronomers to rethink how these features can shape and influence the structure of the universe.
Once upon a time there was a planet
Thousands of years ago, Bronze Age people known as the Xiaohe lived in the now inhospitable Taklamakan Desert of northwestern China – and they made their own cheese.
Researchers found chunks of 3,600-year-old cheese scattered across the heads and necks of mummies of the enigmatic desert dwellers, who buried their dead in unusual boat graves.
Dry conditions preserved not only the human remains but also the cheese, allowing scientists to extract and sequence its DNA. The analysis showed what kind of cheese the Xiaohe people made from goats and cattle.
The ancient cheese remains showed how the Xiaohe could use microbes to improve their food – and may indicate that they were buried with snacks for the afterlife.
Fantastic creatures
Researchers from Harvard and Stanford were understandably surprised when they first came across a walking fish, a sea breast.
The unusual animal has the body of a fish, delicate fins that resemble a bird’s wings and six leg-like appendages that resemble those of a crab.
When the scientists decided to study the sea robins at the genetic level, they encountered a surprise in the laboratory: while some sea robins use their ‘legs’ only for walking, others use them to dig for prey on the seabed.
The team captured video of the burrowing sea robins, whose specialized appendages are covered with sensitive taste buds, similar to those on a human tongue, to detect prey.
The miracle
Stay tuned for these new finds:
– New footage has shown the matriarch of a mysterious orca pod hunting a dolphin and sharing a meal with her pod off the coast of Chile.
– The remains of a 32,000-year-old woolly rhinoceros, excavated from the permafrost of Siberia, are so well preserved that the skin and fur are still intact, providing important insights into the extinct species.
— Marine biologists discovered a species of ghost shark, called the Australasian narrow-nosed ghostfish, in the deep ocean waters near Australia and New Zealand.
Scientists have found evidence of a 30-million-year-old leaf forest trapped in peat on the Falkland Islands near Antarctica, where no trees have grown for tens of thousands of years.
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