A 4,000-year-old stone-lined tomb discovered during construction work in Norway may provide new clues about the first farmers who settled the region, archaeologists say.

Since April, researchers from the University Museum of Bergen have been excavating at the site of a new hotel in Selje, on the North Sea coast of southwestern Norway. So far, they have found traces of prehistoric dwellings and trash heaps full of animal bones, along with a stone tool called a blade sickle and tiny shell beads. But the most unique find is a large stone-lined tomb that held the skeletons of at least five people.

Stone Age people in Belgium were hunting with spear-throwers more than 30,000 years ago — the earliest known evidence of such a weapon in Europe, a new study suggests.

After investigating more than 300 previously known flint artifacts found at the Maisières-Canal archaeological site in southern Belgium, a research team documented that 17 have minuscule fractures that indicate they were points for projectiles of some type.

"My conviction is that all of them are from spear-throwers," study first author Justin Coppe, an archaeologist at the University of Liège in Belgium, told Live Science.

According to the study, the flint points from the Maisières-Canal site, near the town of Mons and the Haine river, show that prehistoric people were hunting there with spear-throwers between 28,000 and 31,000 years ago; and that they apparently preferred these to other types of projectile weapons, such as thrown spears (javelins) and bows and arrows, he said.

Archaeologists have unearthed the remains of two Roman temples and a sacrificial pit in Germany.

The building remnants, located at the site of a former Roman camp known as Haltern in northwestern Germany, are the first known instances of temples found at a Roman military site, according to a translated statement.

During excavations, archaeologists unearthed the clay frameworks of the rectangular buildings. The last time researchers explored the site was in 1928, but the findings were since reburied to help preserve the existing structures.

The twin temples were once part of a larger building complex that measured roughly 21,500 square feet (2,000 square meters). Archaeologists initially thought one of the buildings was used as a meeting house, or "schola," for military officials and later as a workshop, based on some of the tools found strewn about the site. They're currently not sure of the second building's purpose.

Data regarding the subsistence base of early hominins are heavily biased in favor of the animal component of their diets, in particular the remains of large mammals, which are generally much better preserved at archaeological sites than the bones of smaller animals, let alone the remains of plant food. Exploitation of smaller game is very rarely documented before the latest phases of the Pleistocene, which is often taken to imply narrow diets of archaic Homo and interpreted as a striking economic difference between Late Pleistocene and earlier hominins. We present new data that contradict this view of Middle Pleistocene Lower Palaeolithic hominins: cut mark evidence demonstrating systematic exploitation of beavers, identified in the large faunal assemblage from the c. 400,000 years old hominin site Bilzingsleben, in central Germany. In combination with a prime-age dominated mortality profile, this cut mark record shows that the rich beaver assemblage resulted from repetitive human hunting activities, with a focus on young adult individuals. The Bilzingsleben beaver exploitation evidence demonstrates a greater diversity of prey choice by Middle Pleistocene hominins than commonly acknowledged, and a much deeper history of broad-spectrum subsistence than commonly assumed, already visible in prey choices 400,000 years ago.

Thousands of years ago, a woman underwent two surgeries to her head — and survived both procedures, her skull reveals.

Scientists in Spain made the discovery after analyzing the woman's skeletal remains, which were unearthed at a Copper Age burial site known as Camino del Molino, located in Caravaca de la Cruz in southeastern Spain, according to a study published in the December issue of the International Journal of Paleopathology.

The woman, who was between 35 and 45 years old when she died, was one of 1,348 individuals found at the funerary site, which was used from 2566 to 2239 B.C. However, unlike the other skeletons, her skull showed evidence of a series of trepanations, which are surgical procedures that involved drilling or scraping holes through the skull to expose the dura mater, the outermost layer of tissue surrounding the brain and spinal cord, as a form of medical treatment.

Ancient headless skeletons recovered from mass graves in China are the remains of victims who were massacred around 4,100 years ago in headhunting events, including the largest on record from Neolithic Asia, a new study finds.

Headhunting is a practice of taking the heads of enemies as trophies. Surprisingly, all of the 41 headless skeletons analyzed by the researchers belonged to women and juveniles, according to anatomical analyses. It's possible that when rivals attacked the settlement, they targeted women and children, resulting in an "interpersonal conflict with a high level of cruelty," the researchers wrote in the study. It's also possible that interlopers used a "ritual of selective decapitation" when choosing their victims, the team wrote.

"Headless females and children, with evidence for cut marks on their neck vertebrae, are testament to the brutality exerted on these people," Charlotte Roberts, a professor emeritus of archaeology at Durham University in the U.K. who was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email.

Paper: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/arp.1912

While excavating an ancient Egyptian cemetery, archaeologists made a rare discovery: an ovarian tumor nestled in the pelvis of a woman who died more than three millennia ago. The tumor, a bony mass with two teeth, is the oldest known example of a teratoma, a rare type of tumor that typically occurs in ovaries or testicles.

A teratoma can be benign or malignant, according to the Cleveland Clinic, and it is usually made up of various tissues, such as muscle, hair, teeth or bone. Teratomas can cause pain and swelling and, if they rupture, can lead to infection. In the present day, removal of the mass is the typical treatment.