“This innovation was good enough to rapidly spread across this territory,” says Alexandre Lefebvre, an archaeologist at the University of Toulouse-Jean Jaurès and lead author of a new study documenting the find.

Around 15,000 years ago, Western Europe was home to the Magdalenians, a nomadic hunter-gatherer culture that made hunting tools, cave art, and maybe even music. Previous research had shown whale bone weapons were used just north of the Pyrenees mountains, in France. Yet, surprisingly, almost no evidence had been found for the same technology in prehistoric sites along the northern coast of Spain, where whale bones might reasonably have come from.

Lefebvre and his team decided to try to fill that gap by re-examining existing collections of bones taken from 64 sites across the Spanish coast. Many of these bones—found mostly in limestone caves or rock shelters—had been classified simply as bone or antler; Lefebvre suspected some were actually whale bone, scavenged from stranded whales.

Cetacean bones are extremely porous; they are lighter than the bones of terrestrial animals of the same size and have no cavity for bone marrow. Using these criteria, the researchers identified 54 whale bone objects among a trove of more than 8,000 bone artifacts from 12 of the 64 sites along modern-day coastal Cantabria. The majority of them dated to 18,000 to 15,000 years ago, when the researchers think the network was most active.

Most of the newly identified whale bones were crafted projectile points about one centimeter across and up to 21 centimeters long. Some had beveled edges and grooves, likely used to attach small flint blades; some were decorated with geometric designs. All of the weapons had impact fractures, and a subset had traces of resharpening and repair, suggesting the weapons were valued and maintained over time.

Adding these findings to their own previously reported data, the researchers mapped out a trade network spanning over 600 kilometers from Cantabria in Spain, along the coast and across the Pyrenees to the Ariège Valley in southern France. Since the scientists didn’t find any waste from tool manufacturing, they assume that the original sites where the tools were made were on the coast and are now underwater. Only the finished whale bone weapons, not the raw material, seem to have been transported inland, says coauthor Jean-Marc Pétillon.

The study highlights 23 key sites that stand out for hosting a large number of whale bone objects, suggesting they may have been trading hubs. Isturits, France, roughly 60 kilometers from the shoreline, had the highest concentration of whale bones (63 objects have been found), and sat strategically at the center of the network. This site most likely had a “pivotal role” in the distribution of objects far from the coast, says Pétillon. All this, the authors argue, is evidence that the Bay of Biscay was home to the first structured coastal economy in the world.

“This reveals an elaborate network for the circulation and exchange of weapons,” says Paul Pettitt, a Paleolithic archaeologist at Durham University in England who was not involved in the study. This sophisticated trading behavior is just as complex as the economies that evolved around agriculture during the Neolithic Revolution a few thousand years later, Pettitt adds.

João Zilhão, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Barcelona in Spain, who was also not involved with the new work, agrees that the whale bone network shows that the Magdalenian people were engaged in sophisticated interactions. But, he argues that the first coastal economies may have started even earlier. Fishhooks and bones found in East Timor suggest people may have been deep-sea fishing 42,000 years ago, he says, which would have required planning and technical know-how indicative of an organized economy.

Other widely exchanged goods might simply not have lasted long enough for archaeologists to find them, points out Zilhão. “Similar coastal economies involving the circulation of perishables would not be visible in the same way, but that does not mean they did not exist.”

According to the Iraqi Culture Minister who spoke in Baghdad last week, in an "unprecedented" restitution, the US will return to Iraq some 17,000 archaeological treasures dating back 4,000 years and looted in recent decades.

"This is the largest return of antiquities to Iraq," said Dr Hassan Nadhem, hailing it as "the result of months of efforts by the Iraqi authorities in conjunction with their embassy in Washington".

The ancient tablet, which a wealthy US collector had acquired along with other Iraqi artefacts to display in the Washington Museum of the Bible, will be handed over to Iraqi officials at the Smithsonian Institution on September 23.

On Monday, UNESCO called the repatriation of the tablet — along with 17,000 other artifacts sent back to Iraq in July — "a significant victory in the fight against the illicit trafficking of cultural objects".

"The theft and illicit trafficking of ancient artefacts continues to be a key funding source for terrorist groups and other organised criminal organisations," the Paris-based agency said in a statement.

It said that when the Islamic State extremist group controlled large parts of Iraq and Syria between 2014 and 2019, Iraqi archaeological sites and museums were systematically looted.

The rare fragment — also known as the Gilgamesh Dream Tablet, which recounts a dream sequence from the Gilgamesh epic in Akkadian cuneiform script — is one of many ancient artifacts from Iraq and the Middle East that were collected by David Green, the billionaire owner of the Hobby Lobby craft store chain.

In 2019, the artefact was seized by the US Justice Department, two years after Mr Green opened the museum dedicated to ancient Christian history in downtown Washington.

The Epic of Gilgamesh

The clay tablet is inscribed in Sumerian, a civilisation of ancient Mesopotamia (present-day Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran).

It contains sections of a Sumerian poem from The Epic of Gilgamesh, and is one of the world's oldest religious texts, according to UNESCO.

Scholars believe that The Epic of Gilgamesh originated as a series of Sumerian legends and poems about the mythological hero-king Gilgamesh, which were gathered into a longer Akkadian epic much later.

The most complete version existing today is preserved on 12 clay tablets from the library collection of 7th-century BC Assyrian king Ashurbanipal.

The discovery comes almost a year after the remains of two victims of the AD79 eruption of Mount Vesuvius, believed to have been a master and his slave, were found in the same villa.

A chariot shaft was also found in the room, which archaeologists said had served as the humble lodgings of, possibly, a small family who carried out day-to-day work in the villa, including preparing and maintaining the chariot.

The only natural light in the 16-square-metre space came from a small upper window, and there is no evidence of any wall decorations.

Gabriel Zuchtriegel, director of Pompeii’s archaeological park, said the discovery was “exceptional”, especially as it gives a rare insight “into the precarious reality of people who seldom appear in historical sources, that were written almost exclusively by men belonging to the elite”.

Several personal objects were found under the beds, including large amphorae, used for storing personal possessions, and ceramic jugs. The three beds, one child-size, were made of rope and wooden planks.

“What is most striking is the cramped and precarious nature of this room, which is something between a dormitory and a storage room,” said Zuchtriegel. “It is certainly one of the most exciting discoveries of my life as an archaeologist, even without the presence of great ‘treasures’. The true treasure here is the human experience – in this case of the most vulnerable members of ancient society – to which this room is a unique testimony.”

Excavations on the site of the Civita Giuliana villa began in 2017 and several relics have been found, including a ceremonial chariot and a stable containing the remains of three harnessed horses. In May, three frescoes looted from the villa in 2012 were returned to the archaeological park.

Casts were created of the remains of the two Vesuvius victims found in the villa last November. The two men, lying close together, are believed to have escaped the initial phase of the eruption, when the city was blanketed in volcanic ash and pumice, only to then be killed by a further blast the following day.

Experts said the younger man, who was probably between 18 and 25, had several compressed vertebrae, which led them to believe that he was a manual labourer or slave. The older man, aged between 30 and 40, had a stronger bone structure, particularly around his chest, and was wearing a tunic. They were found lying in what would have been a corridor in the villa.

In August, the partially mummified remains, including hair and bones, of a former slave who rose through the social ranks were found in a tomb at the necropolis of Porta Sarno, one of the main gates into Pompeii. The tomb is believed to date from the decade before the city was destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius.

Last month, the partially mutilated remains of a man buried by the eruption were found on what would have been the beach at Herculaneum, the ancient Roman town a few miles north of Pompeii. Archaeologists said the man, believed to have been between 40 and 45, was killed just steps from the water as he tried to flee the eruption.

The aqueduct was unfinished, and likely the product of a brief period in the second century CE of direct Roman control over the city of Artaxata, an ancient Armenian capital now near Khor Virap on the border with Turkey. That is the finding of a German-Armenian team of archeologists, who published the news in the German journal Archäologischer Anzeiger.

The scientists first detected the presence of a series of pillars via a geomagnetic survey of the site in 2018. They then confirmed those findings with a series of partial excavations. In total, they found evidence of about 460 meters of aqueduct support pillars.

The watercourse itself appears not to have been constructed, however, and a combination of optically stimulated luminescence dating and analysis of the political events of the time led the scientists to conclude that it was most likely constructed between 114 and 117 CE before being abandoned.

At the time, Artaxata was the capital of Armenia. Like all the states in the South Caucasus, it was the object of constant geopolitical competition between neighboring powers, particularly the Roman and Persian empires. Local leaders were forced to regularly submit themselves to one in order to protect themselves from the other.

In one brief period, starting in 114 CE, the Roman emperor Trajan attempted to directly rule Armenia, establishing a province with Artaxata as its center and stationing a Roman legion in the city. But local resistance forced the Romans out just three years later. That was likely the cause of the abandonment of the aqueduct, wrote the authors of the paper: Achim Lichtenberger, Mkrch Zardaryan, and Torben Scheriber.

“The unfinished aqueduct of Artaxata is proof of a failed Roman Imperialism in Armenia and an impressive testimony to the Roman attempt to establish a Roman province,” they wrote. “If finished, the monumental arches and the abundance of running water would have turned Artaxata into a Roman city. It would have been the easternmost Roman arched aqueduct in the ancient world.”

Systematic excavations of Artaxata have been going on since 1970. The new findings are from the Armenian-German Artaxata Project, launched in 2018 between the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography of the Armenian Academy of Sciences and the Institute for Classical Archaeology and Christian Archaeology of Münster University.

A team of adventurers, marine archaeologists and technicians located the wreck at the bottom of the Weddell Sea, east of the Antarctic Peninsula, using undersea drones. Battling sea ice and freezing temperatures, the team had been searching for more than two weeks in a 150-square-mile area around where the ship went down in 1915.

Endurance, a 144-foot, three-masted wooden ship, holds a revered place in polar history because it spawned one of the greatest survival stories in the annals of exploration. Its location, 10,000 feet down in waters that are among the iciest on Earth, placed it among the most celebrated shipwrecks that had not been found.

The discovery of the wreck was announced Wednesday in a statement by the search expedition, Endurance22.

The first images of the ship since those taken by Shackleton’s photographer, Frank Hurley, revealed parts of the vessel in astonishing detail. An image of the stern showed the name ENDURANCE above a five-pointed star, a holdover from before Shackleton bought the ship, when it was named Polaris.

Another image, taken from above, shows the ship’s open rear deck and entrance to the main quarters. The pressure of the ice had heavily damaged Endurance before it sank, and in the image the forward part of the ship appears to be badly broken up.

The expedition’s exploration director, Mensun Bound, had said that with the cold water and lack of wood-eating marine organisms in the Weddell Sea he expected the remains of the ship to be relatively well preserved. The stern, especially, looked remarkably pristine.

The hunt for the wreck, which cost more than $10 million, provided by a donor who wished to remain anonymous, was conducted from a South African icebreaker that left Cape Town in early February. Aside from a few technical glitches involving the two submersibles, and part of a day spent icebound when operations were suspended, the search proceeded relatively smoothly.

The battery-powered submersibles combed the seafloor twice a day, for about six hours at a time. They used sonar to scan a swath of the smooth seabed, looking for anything that rose above it. Once the wreck was located several days ago, the equipment was swapped for high-resolution cameras and other instruments to make detailed images and scans.

Under the terms of the Antarctic Treaty, the six-decade-old pact intended to protect the region, the wreck is considered a historical monument. The submersibles did not touch it; the images and scans will be used as the basis for educational materials and museum exhibits.

Shackleton left England aboard Endurance with a crew of 27 in 1914, bound for a bay on the Weddell Sea that was meant to be the starting point for an attempt by him and a small party to be the first to cross Antarctica. This was close to the end of what has become known as the heroic age of Antarctic exploration, which included treks by the Norwegian Roald Amundsen, who in 1911 was the first to reach the pole, and by Robert Falcon Scott, a Briton who died after reaching it a month later.

Shackleton never made it to the pole or beyond, but his leadership in rescuing all his crew and his exploits, which included an 800-mile open-boat journey across the treacherous Southern Ocean to the island of South Georgia, made him a hero in Britain.

Shackleton was tripped up by the Weddell’s notoriously thick, long-lasting sea ice, which results from a circular current that keeps much ice within it. In early January 1915 Endurance became stuck less than 100 miles from its destination and drifted with the ice for more than 10 months as the ice slowly crushed it.

As the ship became damaged, the crew set up camp on the ice and lived on the ice until it broke up five months after the ship sank.

The Weddell Sea still remains far icier than other Antarctic waters, though in recent years ice conditions have been lighter than usual. That was the situation this year, and it helped the expedition reach the search site more easily and remain there safely. The icebreaker, Agulhas II, left the search area on Tuesday for the 11-day voyage back to Cape Town.

In addition to the expedition team, several ice researchers were on board, including Stefanie Arndt of the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany. Dr. Arndt, who studies how Antarctic sea ice may change as the world warms because of human-caused emissions of greenhouse gases, and others spent much time out on the ice drilling cores. On Monday she said on Twitter that they had collected 630 samples from 17 locations, which she called “an incredible number.”